Kitchen conversations
Reflections on the Zero Waste movement and why “universal material rights” could be the way forward
This is our December 2023 Kitchen Talk. This one is also late, however it is holiday time here in Aotearoa, and we needed to rest. The next one in January will be sent on time!
Amandine
In pre-pandemic 2016, parallel to Trace, I embraced a zero-waste lifestyle with my partner. We had a friend studying permaculture at the time and diving deep into the topic of waste minimisation. She handed me Bea Johnson's best-seller "Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste", and that is how the lifestyle started (and Lagom later on!)—an eye-opener somehow. There was also Waste Not by Erin Rhoads and Cradle to Cradle by William McDonough. Zero Waste was exploding into a movement. It was trendy among the upper-middle Western class. Nowadays, post COVID-19, perhaps it feels short-lived, yet the Zero Waste movement brought us significant legacies, highlighting a broken economic system and a challenge so enormous that we’ll need to consider everything from legislation to culture in order to uncover how we might redesign our future.
Embracing a Zero Waste Lifestyle in 2016
Zero Waste as a lifestyle is about producing a minimum amount of rubbish and waste as possible within a household, the goal being waste-free. To achieve this vision, one can follow five simple rules, the five R, or a variation of those—refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot, in that order. There was a significant emphasis on plastic reduction. When we started on the journey of zero waste, the most famous figures in our context came from the U.S. Bea Johnson, as mentioned in the introduction, and Lauren Singer, from Trash Is For Tossers. Locally, we also had influencer Kate Hall, a.k.a. Ethically Kate and The Rubbish Trip's Hannah Blumhardt and Liam Prince.
How does one start being Zero Waste? I think, without realising, that was the first catch for us—buying new stuff and getting rid of other things. The idea was to start fresh. We sourced reusable bags, net bags, nut milk bags, wooden dish brushes, glass jars and containers to store our bulk food. Most of these were bought new. Others were vintage and second-hand. We became obsessed with composting. At the same time, we wanted to let go of things that no longer served a purpose yet could for others. Furniture that had no use, clothing, plastic containers, cutlery, superfluous objects. Trade Me was open on the daily. We were active on Facebook and the local group chats, sharing tips and looking for ideas to improve our systems. I bought no clothing in these first years.
From there, our food shopping habits shifted significantly. We committed to buying fresh food from the market, religiously going to the then-French market in Parnell every Saturday, even if it took a 20-minute drive. It felt good to buy our produce without packaging. We also made acquaintances there, the weekly pleasure to connect with our market garden supplier, Arek, remaking the world. We bought bread in bulk directly from a baker making sourdough loaves. At this time, waste-free stores popped up all over the city. We loved our local shop's abundance of quality bulk food and the few life-saving zero-waste items, the dish brush, the reusable menstrual cup, and dish cloth. We enjoyed going there to refill our olive oil, buy oats, lentils and other provisions. The price of the organic food staples felt attractive. The stores were bright, beige and white. They were full of light and the assurance that we were doing something crucial to mitigate the environmental crisis, opposite to the long-standing bulk food local chain, Bin Inn. Plastic Free July kicked off to encourage people to lower their waste. Still, despite all our efforts, we couldn't fit one year of trash in a jar, let alone two. We felt terrible, throwing tetra packs in the recycling bin on the days we were too lazy to make homemade nut milk or when we had to buy plastic-wrapped new cushions.
The trade-off of the Zero Waste movement
There was in the Zero Waste movement the promise that by strictly reducing the amount of stuff we owned and buying package-free, we would free ourselves from the weight of ownership and accumulation, from the capitalist economy of more, more and more. As we had fewer belongings, life had space for meaningful moments and focus on experiences. We were going to spend less, save money and reduce our footprint on this Earth. Feel happier.
However, living low-waste for a while, we had a few realisations. In twenty-first-century Aotearoa, this lifestyle was actually costly. Here, buying 10 kg of strawberries, even in season, to make jam for winter could cost you close to $220. Over time, the zero-waste shops were packed with useless things. Who on Earth has ever used a honey spoon? Did people really need wool dryer balls and metallic straws? Those who could afford to embrace this hyped lifestyle were driving bulky SUVs and loving meat barbecues. These people also had plenty of time to make their almond milk.
Moreover, by discussing our new lifestyle with our elders and parents, something struck me. This way of living was actually inspired by a peasant, frugal lifestyle—stocking food in bulk, getting fresh food from markets, or growing it ourselves. Making bread, jams and marmalades, flavoured beverages. Repairing our material possessions, mending clothing. That was how my countryside, wealthless grandparents lived most of their lives in France. The reality is that some people here in Aotearoa have been shopping at Bin Inn for years because the flour is much cheaper. Bar soap is way more cost-effective than liquid soap, as is making vinegar cleaning spray. People grow herb or veggie gardens because they can't afford to buy fresh herbs at the supermarket or can't access a local farmer's market. And families have fewer possessions simply because they can't buy more. There was a massive sense of privilege to be able to choose a zero-waste lifestyle, as depicted by influencers. It didn't feel that fun anymore.
The legacies of the Zero Waste movement
When Covid hit, keeping up with a low-waste lifestyle became harder. There was single-use everywhere, as a perpetual medical contamination context depends on it to reduce the spread. Some people made reusable cloth masks. Package-free shops quickly sold their version. I still wonder about the general efficiency of masks, particularly those made from fabrics. We adapted. In parallel, supermarkets started selling organic food, which was much cheaper.
Still, embracing a Zero Waste lifestyle taught us a few key learnings that we still carry today:
Packaging our food in glass to reduce plastic and endocrine disruptors contamination.
Composting our organic waste to reduce our waste bin use, smells from the trash and the need to get the council bin out every week.
Shift our purchasing habits, reusing more, and if buying something, ponder if it is essential.
If buying, focusing on second-hand and pre-loved to promote circularity of goods.
Questioning where our goods are coming from, choosing locally made as much as possible.
Awareness of privileges.
At a community scale, the Zero Waste movement popularised initiatives such as repair cafes, working workshops, and upcycling hubs. Social connections. It pressured for law changes, such as the plastic bag ban or compost collection in Aotearoa, and other take-back schemes like in Australia and Europe. In Raglan, the massive push for extreme zero waste resulted in a complete reorganisation of the waste and landfill system, benefiting the local community and inspiring others to follow suit through waste minimisation plans.
Bea Johnson's social accounts have gone quiet since 2020, and Lauren Singer, after creating a zero waste laundry brand and Package Free Shop, online and brick-and-mortar space based in New York, co-started Overview Capital, a venture fund focusing on methane and climate pollutants mitigation businesses. Overall, I think that what the Zero Waste movement taught us best is that reducing plastic and waste can't be on the hand of the consumers alone, but primarily at the source and through reforming our consumerist system.
Trace
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman defines consumerist culture as “the disabling of the past, ...through a new purchase, we can be born again, move on, or start over with immediacy and ease. Within this culture, time is conceived of and experienced as fragmented, or “pointillist” — experiences and phases of life are easily left behind for something else. It values transience and mobility rather than duration and stability, and the newness of things and reinvention of oneself over endurance. This culture is made possible because of the international free market and only exists in privileged countries, such as the United States, where the per capita income is extremely high.”
The issues of waste are many and interconnected
Waste is a myriad of issues. The departure of business pursuits from all other values and the privatisation and deregulation of the industry have created an economic model based on continual extraction and consumption. That and without a doubt, some sections of society have terrible attitudes towards consumption. For example, tents abandoned at music festivals. This is irresponsible consumption. Affluence and convenience, along with ultra-low-priced products and single-use packaging, have conditioned people to think very little in regard to resource and value extraction, altering our relationship to materials and perceptions of cost and value. Riposte covers this theme in issue 13 in an interview with Nicole McLaughlin, who explains, “I’m trying to show examples of what things could be. People get rid of many things; they don’t realise the value those objects hold.”
What we waste matters more than how much
Much of the zero waste narrative has focused on food and single-use plastics, and we have already seen legislation passed. As of July 2016, it became unlawful for large supermarkets in France to discard or destroy edible unsold food. The law mandated all unsold but edible food should be donated to charities for immediate distribution to those facing material hardship. Food that is unsafe to eat is to be donated to farms for agricultural purposes. The legislation was one of the world’s first attempts to address an inequitable food system. A similar approach that seeks to redistribute resources is that of Australia’s Seamless Clothing Stewardship Scheme. It includes all new clothing imported into or manufactured in Australia and comprises a financial contribution paid by brand owners, 'stewards,' on each new item of clothing they place on the market. That rate is set to four cents at voluntary membership with full enforcement in July this year.
Emily Chan asks, “Why Are Billions Of Clothes Never Even Sold?” for British Vogue, and Kenneth Pucker writes for the Business of Fashion, How Fashion’s Business Model Is Wasteful by Design and that excess is built into the economics of the industry at every step of the value chain. Peter Pernot-Day tells the Wall Street Journal that Shein’s business model saves 30 to 40 per cent of waste by reducing the risk of excess unsold inventory. People have come to understand abundance as success without considering the repercussions on society and Mother Earth. In the essay “Sociology and Postmodernity”, Bauman suggested that postmodern culture does not know of a world with an ‘in-built finality and irreversibility of choices’ and suggests that morality is a ‘functional pre-requisite’ of such a world.
Everything is ‘limited edition’
Presents transformational thinking that views all waste as unallocated resources, Architect Thomas Rau explains in this interview:
“The rule is that all materials are limited; everything is ‘limited edition’. That’s why nothing can be lost. Otherwise, there is a loss of value. Documentation and data are the answer. Data gives the material an identity so that it becomes traceable and can never be lost again. If we want to avoid refuse, we shouldn’t recycle but give all limited editions a documented identity. We have set up something like a land register, or cadastre, for this: Madaster, which documents where in what form and for how long material is stored. The consequence is that everything we produce should be designed as a sort of materials depot: a house, a train, a computer, a coffee maker. None of these products exist forever. With a re-mountable construction, you can easily make something else out of it–not even necessarily the same type of product.”
If we look from the perspective that all materials are limited edition, (re)usage and materials reclamation becomes vital. I can foresee new obligations, new industries and new knowledge requirements as governments introduce policies to align with circular economy and carbon emissions reduction targets. Thomas Rau presented the idea of assigning materials “universal material rights” to the United Nations in New York. “People have rights, and human rights violations are the most common among undocumented people; you can use this analogy for material rights. Material without identity is refused. A material passport prevents it from becoming so.” It is only when all material resources are accounted for that value is retained, and a circular economy can be pursued. Our existing systems are largely inefficient and only work for those who seek to profit in the absence of legal frameworks that hold them accountable for human and environmental rights violations that enable massive wealth creation.
The economies of reversed logistics
Traditionally, once a product has found a buyer and a home, apart from certain obligations under warranties, guarantees and service contracts, the manufacturer lets the product go. End-of-life actions become the responsibility of the consumer. This has to drastically change in a properly functioning circular economy. And it has to be paid for. The failure of REDcycle in Australia received little media attention, but it was a lacking stewardship programme for soft plastic packaging and zero post-market demand that saw 11,000 tonnes of materials abandoned. The best example of a container return scheme in Australia is New South Wales’s Return and Earn scheme, which began in 1977. The Environment Protection Authority, a state government agency, monitors and charges fees to thousands of manufacturers. Its return rate is 76%, and since its inception, it has recovered nine billion containers and returned $900m in refunds. The E.U. has a strategy for sustainable and circular textiles, and the proposed measures to tackle the excessive production and consumption of fashion are not too dissimilar to Australia’s Seamless. The goal ultimately is to have fewer products of higher quality on the market that are repairable and designed with circularity principles.
The future is here. The question is, who will pay for it?
Where alternative materials are required to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and achieve circularity objectives, governments will have to work with scientists, material designers, and industry to understand these new and alternative materials thoroughly and deeply. Further bans and taxes will be required for the industry's willingness to engage in adopting novel plastic-free packaging and for manufacturers and the public to become custodians rather than product owners or consumers. Bioplastics, such as those from potato and other starches, are populating supermarket aisles and takeout locations but require infrastructure to realise their potential for municipal landfill diversion goals.
The Zero Waste movement is pushing companies and material designers’ entrepreneurs to formulate new materials derived from discarded surplus, such as Great Wrap, compostable stretch wrap made from potatoes or packaging in combination with bioplastics or mono-material formats such as the Magical Mushroom Company®. Crafting Plastics has a product, NUTAN, which can be optimised for the production of reusable, durable products with a strong focus on design. All of which can be infinitely reused. And for all the plastic currently in circulation, various experimental designers and studios such as Critical Recycling, Smile Plastics and Noona’s Grocer are creating products from waste and alternative low-impact, circular materials.
Future forward
An essential part of circularity is to plan for what happens when a product becomes ‘out there’ in the world. Within this new economic model, serious and urgent problems of our society must be understood and addressed from varying perspectives—a culture of over-production and waste, materials, usage and functionality. Design is becoming a fundamental discipline, but it is governmental policy that will provide the greatest opportunities for unlocking the potential of resources currently relegated to the bin. Our normality must be to buy and consume only what we need and to be much more conscious about the provenance of the materials used in packaging and other consumer goods. But more than that, renting and borrowing might need to be part of a ‘new normal’ for a much higher proportion of our material goods. How people acquire goods will change. And that will take a great deal of regulation, education and persuasion.
How do you feel about the waste issue and its resolution? Are you practising a zero-waste or low-waste lifestyle? Where do you think waste responsibility falls? We would love to spark a conversation in the comments!
Tracey Creed & Amandine Paniagua
