Five years ago, Lauren Singer decided that she
was going to live a zero-waste lifestyle.
And since, then she's accumulated only a mason jar's worth of trash.
Yes. A mason jar's worth of trash.
She has a pop-up store in Brooklyn
where you can get everything you need
to go zero waste.
It's called Package Free and today on Clarity
we are going to shop it with a special guest
who knows a thing or two about going garbage free.
Let's get started.
So, what inspired you to go trash-free five years ago?
I was inspired by
basically realizing that I loved the environment. I studied environmental
science and was always talking about sustainability but I realized that, even
though I cared about it, I wasn't living that way in my everyday life so I was
protesting against the oil and gas industry but I was using plastic every
day and that didn't make any sense and so to kind of live my values I decided
to go zero-waste.
And so I understand that you kind of have this like two-step
system. So first, you understand and evaluate your trash right and then the
second step is to then transition. Start getting what you need to live a
zero-waste lifestyle.
So can you speak to these two steps and kind of what that is?
I believe anyone can live this lifestyle, regardless of who you are and so the
first step doesn't have to cost anything at all. It doesn't have to make you
change your routine at all. It's just looking at your life, seeing what you're
throwing away and then looking for places that are really easy to make
changes. So for me, I looked at my trash and I realized I was making a lot of
food waste and a lot of product packaging and then the second thing is
actually making those changes. So the first thing that I did was made my own
toothpaste and then once I kind of integrated that into my routine,
I started using a reasonable water bottle. Then I learned how to shop at the
farmers market and then I learned how to compost. It was all baby steps that like
collectively over time led to zero waste, but because I did it little by little,
it was super easy.
The reason that I started my blog really was to make those choices
a lot easier for people because, when I started living this lifestyle, there
weren't really resources available to learn how to reduce my waste. It was kind
of here and there, just kind of scattered
throughout the Internet and I wanted to bring everything together to one place
to make these steps really simple for people.
So to see how easy it is to live a zero-waste lifestyle,
I decided to talk to Lucie Fink from Refinery29.
Lucie implemented Lauren's steps when she went trash free for five days
in her video series, "Try Living With Lucy."
As a 20-something living in New York City,
what was your experience like going trash free for Try Living With Lucy?
My experience going trash free was a lot easier than I thought.
I met with Lauren for the video and she gave me
some pointers and tips
and I didn't realize,
I guess, how simple it was. I kind of had this like daunting idea of what
it would be like to try to reduce your waste. Since meeting her, she was so
inspiring but the convenience factor has been really hard for me. Not a lot of
stores sell things in bulk. I really needed a place like this back then,
but the things I really took away are the little, tiny changes to my life.
Things like asking
for a waiter not to bring you a napkin when you're at a restaurant.
Or a straw or,
you know, going into a coffee shop and bringing a glass jar,
instead of getting a cup from them. And those are actually things I've
implemented in my daily life.
I think people forget that they're super powerful.
The average American person makes about four and a half pounds of
trash per person per day, so over the course of a year, that's over 1,600
pounds of trash going to landfills. So, to me, that's not a small number at all.
If you take that kind of metric into account, you realize that one person
actually does have a big impact on the planet and so that impact can be
positive or negative. It's just what you choose.
Its hard to know what choices to make
to have a positive impact. There's so much information and stuff out there
and we don't know if it's an individual choice or a political choice or business
choice, so what I really try to focus on is empowering an individual to make
small changes and when people are like, "Oh, I can use a reusable water bottle" or
like, you know, "I can use a tote bag." These are really simple changes and
people feel really empowered. I know I did when I made these choices.
It made me feel like I had control over the impact that I was
having on the planet.
What have you learned about yourself
since going trash free?
I wasn't before looking at my own impact in choices as something
that could align with what I cared about. I had all these passions, but I wasn't
doing anything with them and when I went zero-waste, it really was my way to
align what I did in my everyday life with what I cared about and that has
kind of translated into everything that I do in my life. So I quit my job in
government to start a laundry detergent company, which then translated into
me starting my store and it really is when you follow your passions like all
of these things that make you so much happier come together and that's
something that I had no idea about until I decided to go zero-waste.
you