Derek: I want to now introduce Rob Greenfield.
So he's an adventurer, an environmental activist, humanitarian and, as he says,
"A dude making a difference".
Dedicated to leading to more sustainability,
He's the creator of the Food Waste Fiasco,
which is a campaign to end food waste.
He dove into two thousand dumpsters.
Any of you been there? No.
So, across the US to expose nearly half of all the food in the US is wasted,
while one in seven Americans obviously are
food insecure.
So, Rob, come on out.
Rob: Hi everyone!
Nice to be here with you all today.
So, some of you may know me as the guy who
has dived into thousands of dumpsters to
raise awareness about how much perfectly
good food is going to waste.
Some of you may know me as the guy who has
travelled to a far off country with no
money. With just the clothes on my back
and my passport, on a mission to make it
home on the kindness of others and show
the world that people are good.
Or as the trash man from a project where
I spent a month in New York City living
like the average American wearing every
piece of trash that I generated to create
a visual of how much garbage we make in
just one month.
Or the guy who has just one hundred eleven
possessions to his name.
Or maybe the guy who lived in an off the
grid 50 square foot tiny house.
So, I do a lot of very extreme adventures
and environmental activism campaigns and
the idea is to get people to stop and
think about really important environmental
and social issues.
But what most of you probably don't know
is that I haven't always been this way.
I haven't always had a desire to have a
positive impact on the world or to be the
change that I wished to see.
So, if we rewind about ten years, this is
me during college (audience laughter).
And if you don't know what this is, this
is a duck bong. So it is like a beer bong
except it's an ornamental plastic lawn
duck. You cut a hole in the beak and the
foot off, and you fill it up with about
five beers. The most efficient way to
drink five beers, as you can imagine. (audience laughter)
So, I was very passionate about partying,
women, material possessions and money.
I had a part-time job during college and
that was pursuing women but when I wasn't
successful I ran into things like unlucky
Christmas trees. (audience laughter)
So, (laughs) every Sunday I spent about two hours
shining my car, and my goal was to be a
millionaire by the time that I was thirty years old.
Now during this time I actually thought I
was doing pretty good for the environment.
I was the one who was recycling the beer
cans and the beer bottles after all of our parties.
I was the one who would yell at my roommate, Ricky, for leaving the faucet on
while he was brushing his teeth.
So I thought I was doing pretty good.
But after college, something happened and
I realized I had to totally transform my life.
And this is the part of the story where
I'm supposed to tell you about some sort
of near death experience, a moment of enlightenment, some sort of ah-ha moment.
But I actually didn't have anything like that.
I just simply started to watch a lot of
documentaries and read a lot of books and
realized that all of my little daily actions were causing destruction to the
world around me, to all the things that I loved.
People, animals and the earth.
The gasoline that I was pumping into my
car was part of the routine ten thousand oil spills that happened per year.
The food I was eating was coming from
factory farms, the trash I was making was
being sent to landfills where you make
greenhouse gases from above, and a toxic sludge from below.
And the cheap crap that I was buying,
well, people were working half way around
the world in horrible conditions to bring that to me.
And so I realized I wasn't a part of the solution very much at all.
I was basically the problem.
And at that point I could have felt total doom and gloom.
Totally helpless and hopeless, like what
can I possibly do now? I'm one in seven billion.
Instead, I actually felt really empowered
because now I knew the problems and now I knew the solutions.
So, what I did, is I made a long list of
changes that I wanted to make and I hung it right up in my kitchen.
Right where I would see it everyday and my
goal was to just make one positive change a week to change my life.
And I started with small things like
carrying a reusable grocery bag and
bringing that to the grocery store.
Or starting to ride a bicycle more and
drive the car less. Starting to shop at
the local farmer's market and support
local businesses rather than the big chain stores.
And starting to stop eating the junkie, processed, packaged foods and instead
a more plant-based whole food diet.
And what happened was, the more I made
these positive changes in my life for the
environment, the more I realized that they
were positive for myself as well.
And I was becoming a lot happier and a lot healthier.
Of course less duck bongs didn't hurt at
all in that area as well.
And so, after about two years of making
positive changes, I had made over one
hundred positive changes at just one per week.
And so, at that point I really learned a
valuable lesson, and that's that great
change doesn't happen overnight.
It starts with one small change and then
another, and then another, and each change
is basically a building block in the
foundation towards a more environmentally
friendly and socially just life.
And those things that in the past, seemed
like giant, unachievable leaps forward,
were now just one small step forward.
So, I really started to feel like I was
becoming the change that I wanted to see in the world.
I was leading by example.
But I felt like I really needed to do more
with the state of the world we are in.
I felt like I needed to not just lead by
example but really live it out loud and
inspire more people to make positive changes.
But at this time, I didn't have a single
follower on social media. I had no website
and no media was covering what I was doing
so I had to come up with a crazy idea.
I was going to bike across the United States on a bamboo
bicycle and have no impact, whatsoever.
And by doing that I'd be able to live
sustainability to the extreme while being
able to bring to as many people as possible.
So, I had to set rules for all the aspects
of sustainable living. Things that we
deal with everyday-food, water, energy
waste and transportation.
For food, the rule was I could only eat
local, organic, unpackaged food.
Which basically meant almost nothing that
you would get at a typical grocery store.
And in California I did alright, but after
I got out of California, I quickly
realized there are food deserts that exist
all across the United States.
So I made one exception. And that was
that I could go dumpster diving.
I figured if the food was in the dumpsters and going to waste,
I might as well eat it.
But most of you, the way you
might feel now, thinking about eating food
from the garbage, that's how I felt at first.
I was worried about my ego. I was worried
about what people might think about me, so
I timidly climbed up to the dumpster,
I looked inside, and sure enough, there
was food in there. So I hopped in and the
first thing that I ever ate was a still frozen, half gallon of ice cream.
And I didn't have a spoon with me that day
so I just dug right in with my sunglasses
(laughter) and that was the beginning of
my dumpster diving experience.
>From that point on dumpster after dumpster
after dumpster was filled with perfectly good food.
But there was a girl that I was very
much in love with back in San Diego.
I talked to her on the phone and she told me
whatever you do, don't tell anybody that
you are dumpster diving. (audience laughter)
So I listened for a little while, but we
will get back to that in the end. (audience laughter)
So, for water, I couldn't use any water
from on the grid. No turning on a faucet,
taking a shower, using a flush toilet.
Any of the ways that we are used to using
water on a daily basis.
Instead, I purified it from lakes and rivers or drank rainwater.
And for electricity, I couldn't use any
electricity from on the grid either so no
turning on a light switch, no plugging
into an outlet, no using the air conditioning or a fan on a hot night.
And it came down to even things like if I
wanted to go into a store and they only
had automatic doors, I'd wait until
someone else walked in and then hop in
behind them. (audience laughter)
By stripping my life back to the basics
I was able to start to deeply understand
how electrified my life was and how I was
actually using resources and effecting the
world around me through all my little daily actions.
For trash, the rule was I had to carry every piece of
garbage that I created, all the way across the country with me.
So if I had, say a granola bar in Nevada,
I had to carry that wrapper all the way to Vermont with me.
And in an entire summer I created just two
pounds of trash, that you see here, which is what the average person
in the United States makes by about one o'clock in the
afternoon on any given day.
And of course, for transportation
I couldn't use any fossil fuels to cross
the country, whatsoever. So biking the
entire way, even on the off days.
And as you can imagine, by really living
sustainability to the extreme for an
entire summer for one hundred and four
days, it really ingrained it into my
lifestyle, into my philosophy, and into my actions.
So when I got back to San Diego, I was
still making positive changes in my life.
But I found that being back in my
apartment, I was consuming more resources then I wanted to.
I would leave the water on or the
electricity on because it was seemingly infinite.
So I decided I wanted to do what I did on
the bike ride and do it at home instead.
And how I decided I was going to do that
was to live in a little tiny house off the grid in San Diego.
To give you an idea of how small it was,
it was five feet wide, so not quite wide
enough for me to extend my arms out, ten
feet long, so not quite two of me long,
and a not quite tall enough for me to stand in.
So it was pretty small, but I thought, I
like to do extreme things and this would
be a good way to get people to think about
the size of their houses, so I'll go for it!
And at the tiny house I lived off the grid
so all my water came from harvesting rainwater.
And a lot of people would think that might
be impossible to live just off of rainwater, let alone in
San Diego, which is sort of a desert.
And let alone in a mega drought, which
California was in at the time.
But one of the really important things
that I have learned is that everything in
life is a matter of perspective.
No matter what issues you are working on,
everything is a matter of perspective.
So the average American uses about eighty
to one hundred gallons of water per day.
The average European uses about fifty gallons of water per day.
And the average person in Sub Saharan Africa uses two to five gallons of water
per day. So to the American, it's crazy
how little is used over in Africa and to
the person in Africa, it's crazy how much
is used over here. And so what I started
to realize is once I changed my perspective, I could really start to
change the world around me, overnight.
At the tiny house all of my electricity
came from these little solar panels.
And another really important thing that
I've learned is that sustainable living is also a spectrum.
So you can look at the really expensive ninety thousand dollar electric vehicles
with the giant solar panels and think,
that's only available to the wealthy.
The way that I was able to really live
sustainably was by simplifying my life
and needing less. And when you do it
that way it becomes accessible to a larger
number of people.
Now if you had asked me, the guy doing the
duck bongs and chasing all the women in
sight, what I would be doing in five years
I definitely would not have said this.
I would not have thought that I would be
pooping in a five gallon bucket and
composting my own poop. (audience laughter)
But, one of the really important things
that I learned is that everything that is
really convenient, everything that is
really easy in life, what that usually
means is that the burden has been outsourced elsewhere.
So, talk about easy, you go in the toilet,
you hit that lever, poop is out of sight out of mind.
You never have to think about it again.
It becomes someone else's problem.
Whereas with the compost toilet,
I actually had to do the work. But instead
of creating a waste product that caused
problems, it created a valuable resource
that could be used to grow food.
So I could talk about poop for about ten
minutes but we don't have time for that,
so we will move on. (audience laughter)
At the tiny house this is the amount of
trash that I would create in a month,
so more than on the bike ride,
but still about thirty times less than the average person.
And so as you can see, I like to take things to the extreme.
I like to do extreme things to get us to
self reflect on our own lives and think
about what we can do with our own actions
that can have a positive impact on the
world around us. But when I first started
to do all this, I was pretty worried about
what people would think about me.
You know, my ego, would it take a hit?
And I was pretty worried, so you remember
at the beginning I mentioned that one girl
who told me not to tell anybody that I was
dumpster diving, well, here we are hosting
a Food Waste Fiasco together.
We've now been together for two and a half years.
And so this is proof that you can eat the
trash and have the girl, too.
(Audience laughter)
But seriously, the most important thing
that I have ever learned, if you want to
affect change in the world, is to drop
social norms, stop worrying about what
people think about you and just do what
you know is right for the earth, for your community and yourself.
And speaking of not worrying about what
people think about you, imagine wearing
all the trash that you created, around
New York City for an entire month.
(pause) ya, so, (laughs) (audience laughter)
You know, I've always believed that
everyone in this room, that every one of
us as individuals can truly have a
positive impact on the world around us
through all of our daily actions.
When people say, does it really matter?
I have always been the first one to say it does matter.
But never did I feel it as strong as the
day that I was sitting here in Union Square and on the last day,
covered in thirty days of trash, thinking to myself, this is how much trash
once of us makes in a month! Now imagine
a year! Now imagine ten years! Now imagine a lifetime!
In one lifetime you can create a mountain
worth of trash or no mountain of trash to
leave behind for future generations at all.
Proof that our little daily actions really do matter and do add up.
So the point of all this is not to get
you to run out of here and dive into every
dumpster you see, or wear all of your trash for a month,
or bike across the country, or any of those things.
You can do those if you want to, but the
point is, what can we do as individuals to
have a positive impact on the world around us?
Through all ol of our daily actions?
So I have a little challenge for you.
Think of just one positive change that you can make in your lives. Just one.
Write that down o a piece of paper before leaving here today.
And then take that home, hang it up in your kitchen,
or wherever you will see it every day, and then make that change.
And once you have made that one, make another, and then another,
and then another. Until you become the change you wish to see in the world.
Thank you and enjoy!
(audience applause)
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