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Trash is for Tossers
Other | Friday 17th July 2015 | Federica
24-year-old Environmental Studies major Lauren Singer decided she’d had enough of waste in her life. Right after graduating from NYU, she started to live a Zero Waste life: this means she only produces a jar of trash in months – a small jar too.
Lauren's 2 years of trash:
Lauren got the idea during her college years, when her Seventh Generation fame professor Jeffrey Hollender urged his students to live their values. She had always been interested in helping the environment, but the point when she decided to turn her life from ethically addressed to practically ethical was when she noticed how much trash her fellow students produced by bringing lunch from home or buying it in the campus. “A fellow environmental studies major would bring lunch to class every week in a single use plastic bag, a disposable water bottle, and a plastic takeout container. I would sit there and think, we are supposed to be the future of this planet and here we are with our trash, messing it up” is what she wrote on her blog.
A few days later her Trash is for Tossers project begun. The aim is to live without producing any non-recyclable, non-compostable waste.
Lauren’s path has been getting more and more waste-free every month. First she started with bringing her lunch around in glass jars instead of plastic containers, then she managed to substitute all of her bags with canvas ones, and now she even makes her own soaps and makeup. She even invented her own recipe for an environmentally-friendly toothpaste: “Sure” she says “you have to get over the saltiness of the baking soda, get into using a spoon instead of a tube, and you might miss the frothing and bubbling of commercial toothpaste” but the consequences are huge, since you avoid putting a lot of plastic and non-recyclable materials in cycle for your whole life, simply by giving up on commercial toothpaste.
In the last year and a half, Lauren has only produced about two marmalade jars worth of trash. She recycles and makes compost of course, but she is proud to believe she will only leave a few (canvas, for sure) bags of trash in her entire life living like this.
Her whole point is to show people how easy and affordable it is to live a zero-waste life. In order to do so, she constantly posts on her blog, where followers can find out where to shop and eat ecologically, and also Lauren’s own recipes for cosmetics.
The first two steps to a Zero Waste life are:
1- Evaluate, by answering the question: what products do I use that I can get more sustainable alternatives to?
2- Transition: start to downsize and properly dispose of the unnecessary things.
Lauren’s motto is “if I can do it, anyone can”. We should definitely give it a try because we now know “Trash is for Tossers”.
Follow Lauren on Twitter and Instagram.
