Environmental Protection & Zero Waste
A growing attention to avoiding consumption, discarding, and pollution both honors the earth and protects the life upon it. Household- and community-led composting projects… local governments mandating that all new housing be energy-efficient… national agreements to reduce carbon emissions… these and many other initiatives are part of the quickly spreading movement.
And not a moment too soon. The current model of hyper-consumptive industrialization is exhausting the earth’s natural resources while flooding it with waste products, including greenhouse gases. The natural systems that sustain human life – fresh water, food, fuel, materials for building and clothing - are increasingly stressed and, in places, collapsing. Marginalized people suffer most from both the loss of resources and the pollution. With catastrophic climate change now threatening, reducing our consumption and our pollution - especially in wealthy societies - has become a matter of the survival of humanity and its home.
One easy place to start is with the trash we produce every day, through a new movement called zero waste. Instead of seeking to ‘manage’ waste, this important philosophy and campaign aims to eliminate it. Zero waste considers the entire life cycle of the material objects in our lives, everything from chairs to cars to computers. These goods are merely one point in a long chain of activities – natural resource extraction, processing, production, transportation, consumption, and disposal – which is simultaneously exhausting the planet’s resources and creating increased pollution. Zero waste re-examines this system with an ethical, economic, and environmental eye. It recognizes that the “upstream” problems of deforestation, mining and global warming are directly linked to the “downstream” problems of waste, pollution and toxics.
Zero waste starts with the humble elements of waste reduction, re-use, recycling and composting. But it goes further by requiring companies to change the way they design and manufacture goods so that they are free of toxins. Ultimately, zero waste aims to create a society that lives sustainably on a finite resource base. In the process, it strengthens local economies with jobs, reduces energy demands and thus climate change, and saves local governments money that is spent cleaning up industries’ mess.
Instead of looking towards technology for quick-fixes, zero waste focuses on how we eat, move and live in the world. It asks us to consider our real needs and then to seek to meet them without creating toxic substances at the beginning or end of the process. One obvious example is forsaking packaged food products and instead purchasing fresh food directly from local farmers. But we can name hundreds of examples, from listening to local musicians instead of buying CDs to carrying one's own cloth bags instead of using plastic. Almost all solutions to 'waste' problems can be found by looking within one's community, harvesting its skills and talents, and learning how to live with 'enough'.
Fortunately, this does not mean a reduction in quality of life; in fact, often it is just the opposite. Environmentalist Annie Leonard described to us one of the movement’s strengths: “It’s not a technical, materials-based approach but a community-building, social relations approach.” Zero waste’s low-cost, simple solutions tend to strengthen our relationships within the community, support the local economy, and be good to Mother Nature. They rely on neighbors sharing what they have instead of buying their own. They focus on meeting the physical needs of food, shelter, and clothing through local skills and the local ecology. Sharing and joint problem-solving, not money and material goods, become the currency of exchange.
From Canberra to Buenos Aires to San Francisco, cities have passed zero waste resolutions and are moving forward with concrete plans for implementation. The Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA) is providing unity and strength to the work of its 600-plus organizational and institutional members in 82 countries.
One of GAIA’s members, Zerowaste Kovalam, provides a shining example of how the looming dangers of environmental destruction can be defied. When garbage filled hillsides and clogged waterways and the state government moved to install an incinerator in Kovalam, a town in southern India, the population began to organize. Residents exerted enough pressure to force the government to shelve the incinerator plans and then, in 2000, formed Zerowaste Kovalam. The project’s success has been based on community mobilization, led by women and involving most everyone, even primary schoolchildren. Based on the values of community control, public interest over corporate interest, and democracy, Kovalam provides a model of creating sustainable systems and closing each waste loop. The community has moved from recycling to inventing livelihoods in such resourceful ways as replacing plastics by making and selling more than 100 products from coconuts. Cloth discarded from tailors is converted to marketable items, bringing income for low-income families. Construction of a small biogas plant, fed by local compost, lightens both cost and environmental impact, while the slurry creates healthy fertilizer. Poison-free farming has reversed the toxicity of the soil while generating organic food and fair trade.
Given the advanced state of planetary damage, the human community will have to do much more, and soon, especially to dramatically reduce consumption in the global North and find large-scale alternatives to oil. We have spent many months trying to find successful examples of the latter and, while we are encouraged by some moves, they are still few. The reasons are two-fold. First is political and economic control by major oil companies. While their power could be significantly reigned in in the U.S. by such government measures as regulating prices and separating the interests of oil and state, politicians have not chosen to do so. Second, those solutions that do exist tend to be very tech-focused, and are not affordable or accessible on any wide scale yet. Government funding that could be developing solar and geo-thermal options, for instance, has thus far backed oil interests.
If we – the whole of society - have even a little sense, we will soon begin applying our hearts and minds towards solutions. Whether motivated by unwillingness to pay for gasoline that sometimes tops three-dollar-plus, fear over climate destruction, or horror that the U.S. is waging war in Iraq to get the oil under its ground, this is a movement whose time must quickly come.
