I'm Catherine Alrashton
and I'm from Nassau County Long Island.
I'm married to my husband Odai
and we have two children.
Unfortunately, I have to say that we're very wasteful
when it comes to garbage.
We go through about four bags of trash everyday.
We use paper plates, paper napkins,
we're totally addicted to plastic.
Plastic forks, plastic knives, plastic spoons,
all the cutlery is all plastic.
I use plastic bags for everything.
Cones, cheese puffs, broken cookies, old goldfish,
this is probably going in the garbage
'cause they're probably stale.
I tend to overbuy at the grocery store
and just add too many things to the refrigerator
and before I know it they've all expired
and they're all in the garbage.
Often times I'm throwing away food that we didn't even eat.
Being that I have an 18-month-old,
we go through a lot of products.
I wouldn't even begin to know
how many diapers we go through in a day,
I just know that it's a lot, it's constant.
That's the biggest source of waste for us.
We do not recycle, everything goes into the same trash bag
and that's just what we do.
I wanna learn to be less wasteful
if someone would just show us the way.
Can I get a baguette?
Can I just get it in here though?
I'm Amanda Lindner and I live a zero-waste lifestyle
in New York City.
The amount of trash that I have accumulated
so far in the past year and a half
could literally fit in the palm of my hands.
If I can live a zero-waste lifestyle,
I know I can help anyone do it.
Styrofoam cups, plastic cups, plastic straws,
plastic bags, paper towels,
lots and lots of paper napkins.
We are in the kitchen right now,
I am looking for everything that's disposable.
For your paper napkins,
we're gonna swap that for old school cloth napkins.
This is a wood and bamboo dish brush
and you can use this instead
of the old, plastic, dingy, gross sponge.
Bringing your own fork or washing a fork
might seem like a little bit of effort,
but in comparison to all the effort
and all the resources that go into making this plastic fork,
it doesn't seem like that much work, right?
No, I think that's a great tip
because that's something easy, just throw it in your bag.
Totally, you use it for an average of 15 minutes
and then it sits in a landfill for the next 500 years.
These plastic bags are some
of the worst polluters in the whole world.
We are swapping them for reusable tote bags
that you can take with you anywhere.
We're gonna swap these single use Ziploc bags
for the reusable silicone versions.
You can microwave these, you can freeze these,
you can stick 'em in the dishwasher,
and these are gonna last you a lifetime.
I see you have about one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven bottles in here right now.
And I am going to introduce you
to your new alternative, the shampoo bar.
You can put it directly on your hair
or you can lather it into your hands
and then scrub it into your scalp.
You can use toilet paper,
the difference is that this toilet paper
is actually made from recycled paper.
Bamboo toothbrushes, you can actually
compost the wooden handle.
I wanted to introduce you to these cloth diapers.
All you do is wash the liner that's inside of them
and you can reuse these cloth diapers over and over again.
It's gonna save you a ton of trash,
a ton of plastic waste,
and it's gonna save you a ton of money, too.
The information that she's giving me,
I feel like it's literally changed my life,
so that I can move forward beyond today and beyond tomorrow.
I don't think the convenience is worth the cost
because I don't think that it's sustainable,
I think that everybody has to eventually do what I'm doing.
So out of this entire garbage bag,
this part is the only actual garbage, not so bad.
Yeah, it's a lot less.
Plastic bottles can be recycled.
Paper recycling, so these are things like cardboard boxes.
We have our compost, this is food waste
and any paper that's been soiled.
And over here we have film recycling
and you can return them to the store
and they get recycled into new plastic bags.
(woosh)
The first thing I suggest
is whenever you're leaving the house,
whether it's if you have your purse with you, your bag,
your briefcase, whatever it is,
also throw in there a fork from home,
a reusable cloth napkin, a spoon, a reusable straw,
if you just use a straw. And that, and I really like
the reusables baggie type things, too.
Yes! Yeah, yeah,
she really loved those. That's a great thing.
We should put up the resource for that, too.
(applause)
We want these guys to continue their waste-free lifestyle,
so there's a cool company called Swell,
they make eco-friendly water bottles,
it's kinda what put them on the map,
but they have so many more products now.
So they're giving you guys a $500 gift card to that.
So that's great. (applause)
Oh my God (laughs).
Yeah, that goes a long way with Swell.
(twinkling)
(cheering)
(twinkling)