Zero waste as a journey

What is zero waste?

Zero waste is part of the sustainability movement. As the name implies, its end goal is the avoidance of all waste a person can generate in a month/ year or even a life time. Before you start worrying how this would be possible, for the most people, including me, it’s not about the complete avoidance of waste but doing the best you can do to avoid waste. As in every movement where people want change, it’s never about 1% of the people being perfectly zero waste but about as many people as possible to reduce 1% (or even more) of their waste.
Just think about there are 500 million people living in Europe if everyone of them would reduce their waste about 1m² per year. It would save 500 million m² or 500 sq. km in one year. That’s bigger than the Seychelles. If that would be possible every moth for a year or even years, well you do the maths.

Where to start

The most of us don’t really think about the things we use every day and all their packaging that goes through our hands and that most of it goes in the next bin. To be aware of this is the first step.
It can be pretty overwhelming to realise how much waste we create, even in normal times, when we don't live in a pandemic. Therefore, the best way to start is with just one area of our life. It can be one of the meals of the day if by coincidence you read this article just around breakfast, dinner or lunch or it can be one of your areas in your home, for example bathroom or kitchen. Take this area That’s feels right for you. No matter, if it's the easy choice or the hard one but I would recommend the easy one to see how you make progress and then go to next one but up to you.

The journey

After finding out how much trash is generated, the next step is to find out how to reduce it. Reducing is one of the 4Rs. Maybe you already heard about them. The first R Refusing is the reason why zero waste is part of sustainability. The more you refuse the less is produced and waste generated. Please, think twice before you buy something. Your wallet and and the environment will be very happy.
Refusing also means not buying all the things who zero waste doer show on Instagram or Pinterest. As it's much more important to reuse things instead of replacing with something else. The only stuff you need to replace immediately is everything with microplastics in it. Click here if you want to know more about microplastics.

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