11 Dec Zero waste in a consumerist society. Will it ever work?
By Hannah Crowe
This entry has been submitted for the BBC student critic of the year award. Entry requirements are: Students will need to submit three examples of work they have produced while in full- or part-time education and published or broadcast in media aimed either solely or predominantly at a student audience.
Zero waste is a radical, somewhat revolutionary new way of thinking about the place of consumerism in society. It is based on a set of principles that aim to restrict how much waste we produce, in turn reshaping the way we think about the things we purchase, and limiting the impact these habits have on the planet.
To be successfully implemented on a global scale, and to evolve past the conceptual stages, there needs to be a shift in culture and in the attitudes adopted by a large chunk of the population. It is for this reason that living an entirely zero waste lifestyle is particularly challenging, and perhaps not entirely feasible. Alexander Furey is Co-Director of Zero Waste London and Founder of Zero Waste Mindset. Alex lives almost entirely zero waste, but thinks a shift in consumer mentality is imperative for zero waste to be a successful global movement. We spoke about the challenges surrounding introducing an entirely new way of thinking and what this means for policymakers.
Alex, some people think zero waste is unrelated to climate change because it may be too personal, and therefore too insignificant to make much of a difference. What do you think about this?
Climate change and zero waste overlap in many ways; for example, if you reduce the amount of waste you produce, it leads to less emissions of gases like methane from landfill sites and pollution from waste disposal facilities. If we reduce our consumption it reduces the amount of manufacturing and production that will take place and the pollution and contribution to climate change that those processes produce.
So in theory, zero waste and climate change go hand in hand. One is personal and one is a global issue, but If we wish to push zero waste further than a personal goal, there will surely have to be a shift in policy. What sort of policy changes do you think are needed to achieve this?
One type is Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) policies, which need to be implemented widely so that manufacturers of goods will be responsible for dealing with the products they produce at their products’ end of life. This will vastly alter the landscape of consumerism. Another type would be bans on a variety of single use items (coffee cups, straws, etc) to be introduced as I’m afraid we need to force people out of these convenience driven, single-use habits that we have adopted.
That’s interesting! But with talks of banning single use plastics which are obviously produced en masse, profits for businesses are very much dictated by the volume of product a company can sell. How would we be able to force companies to make change when there could be a lot of money at stake?
We need to encourage companies to start looking to sell services instead of products, so that people don’t buy things, and instead lease things, and pay an ongoing subscription instead of a one off fee, meaning that once a product reaches end of life, the company will take it back and provide a replacement. The benefits of this are numerous; companies will have customers for life through their ongoing relationships with their clients, it will also encourage producers to offer higher quality products that aren’t designed to break after five minutes, because otherwise they will have to be providing constant replacements.
This does sound like quite a lot for companies to wrap their heads around. What would you say are the biggest general challenges surrounding zero waste?
There are a few, but moving the focus off recycling as ‘the solution’ and also encouraging people and companies to properly approach their waste challenges from a zero waste perspective by looking at their business offering holistically, not just making the consumer-facing end of their business zero waste.
Finally, Alex, what is your honest interpretation of this lifestyle? Is it too idealistic or do you genuinely think that zero waste can be implemented on a larger scale?
I say a zero-waste society is absolutely plausible, although going totally one hundred percent zero waste might not be totally possible, as there might always be some small kind of waste product produced. In my view, it is changing the context through which we view the world to a perspective and answering the question of “How can we live on this planet in a way where we don’t negatively impact the world around us?”
I think approaching everything we do from a true zero waste perspective can provide some powerful answers to this question. We need to shift peoples’ mindsets and it will come from changing the language and messaging around the world of ‘waste’.
I also love the power of the term zero waste in terms of its ambition over a term like ‘low waste’ because firstly, zero waste is tangible so you can see what it looks like, and it also encourages you to take more ambitious actions if you are deciding to go zero waste, rather than low waste which is vague and can be achieved by making small changes.
Going “zero waste” is no walk in the park. It requires an overhaul of current ways of thinking, extreme will power and a moderate shift in policy at a government level. It’s very unlikely that in our current political climate MP’s will have this in their minds, let alone in their manifestos, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aim high. As Alex said, the term zero waste holds power in it’s phrasing by demonstrating tangibility and by encouraging action. There is an inextricable link between zero waste and climate change, and Alex made it very clear that the problem of climate change can be tackled with a zero waste mindset. The biggest steps will be taken when businesses are on the same page as the individuals who are living this way, and we can only hope that this comes sooner rather than later.
