Happy Earth Day!!
If you haven't every heard of zero waste please stop everything your doing and watch this VIDEO. Did you watch the video? Good! Now do yourself a favor and go watch every video that Bea Johnson has ever been in. There are also lots of other people on YouTube and bloggers that discuss this lifestyle more.
I feel like when I start talking about zero waste most people are at first confused. After the initial confusion leaves them they just think I'm being eccentric. If you think about it, compared to the mounds of garbage most homes produce in a week, this lifestyle does seem over the top. Bea and her family can produce one quart of waste (meaning anything that can not be recycled or repurposed into something else) a year! Lets just say my family produces..not a quart of waste a year.
I feel I need to make something very clear. Being zero waste is a life style but that will take time and no one will EVER be prefect at it. As long as you are striving to make the wold a better place by producing less waste in your life, I think you are doing a wonderful job. Just being aware that your garbage doesn't magically disappear once a week to a place of magic where it vanishes, you're already thinking like an environmentally conscious person.
In Bea Johnson's book Zero Waste Home, she often points out that the only way to make zero waste work is by making it work for your family. If you make a change to your home and it flips your family upside down for the worst, it just isn't worth it. For example, Bea talks about how she wanted to eliminate toilet paper from her home for a time. She said that she experimented with many different natural products to wipe their bottoms including moss from the woods.🙀 She does mentions that this change did not sit well with her family and it actually made their lives harder, so why force something that makes them all miserable. Now some changes are hard to make but they are necessary if you want to make a difference in the world. Just make sure you are making changes to your family's way of living that they can live with.
I think it is easiest when starting a new habit to start small. If small for you is to start recycling, that sounds great to me! If starting small is giving up all plastic water bottles and just having one glass water bottle, awesome! Just remember your seemingly small everyday actions will have a ripple effect for better or for worse on this place we call home. I challenge you this earth day to go zero waste perfectly! I'm kidding. 😉 I do challenge you to make one small change to your life to help make this planet last just a little longer.
The change I will be making to my life will be preparing my own homemade tooth paste and deodorant. If you have any awesome recipes please let me know! What will your small change be?
