You might have heard of the term ‘zero waste’ before but what does it actually mean? Zero waste is a lifestyle carried out by many whom try to live their lives by making the least amount of litter(waste) possible. This idea might scare some off as at most supermarkets we see everything packaged in plastic and other harmful packaging, and therefore at first glance it may seem impossible to live a life of zero waste.

So how can we live a life of zero waste?

Well to start off you should stop purchasing single-use plastic bags and containers, overall everything that is single use. This can be from fast fashion to packaging, hygiene products to drink and food, but you should rather opt for and replace such items with reusable bags such as cloth tote bags, reusable jars for your flour,seeds,nuts etc, you should also start buying your clothes from sustainable fashion brands or thrift stores, as fast fashion also has a greatly damaging impact on our environment. But such choices could be expensive in many cases, and therefore some might find it difficult to live up to such lifestyle choices, however this is understandable, but if you are lucky enough to afford such a lifestyle than you should live up to it in order to help the environment, your community and make the world a better place.

However, it’s not enough to reduce our plastic waste, we also have to deal with our organic waste like; potato peels etc. Now how do we manage to do this? Well the soloution for taking care of our organic waste is much simpler than for plastic waste. We can take care of our organic waste through a process called ‘composting’, this involves collecting potato peels, left behind vegetables, fruits or anything of this sort and placing it in a composting bin, where it can be left behind to decompose.

But at the beginning it can be difficult to adapt to this new lifestyle and therefore you might still build up some waste. What should you do in this situation? First of all you should NOT give up, because this is a time consuming process and does take some time to adapt to, and don’t forget you are not only doing this for yourself but you are doing this to show that you care, and to show your love to mother nature, and everyone living on our planet and for the future generations. So you should recycle the waste that you have built up, forgive yourself because noone is perfect and keep on trying your best and follow the 5 R’s (refuse,reduce,reuse,recycle,rot), and as time goes by zero waste will become a habit of your daily routine and you’ll do it without even noticing.

But why is plastic harmful?

One of the problems with plastic is that it takes too long to decompose, to put this in perspective plastic bags which we use everyday can take between 10-1000 years to decompose, now you can imagine how bad the problem can be with tougher and larger objects, for example a plastic bottle which is still not a large object, can take up to 450 years or more to decompose, and it can get worse as the object gets bigger and the more durable it is. Another issue with plastic is that some are not fully recyclable, this is because the extent to which they can be recycled can differ depending on technical factors. For example, different plastics cannot be mixed together and be recycled, but they have to be seperated into their individual types or groups where they can be recycled specifically among their own types.

However, recycling can be an expensive and a time consuming process and therefore many firms refuse to recycle. This has meant that out of our recyclable materials only 9%(2018) is actually recycled. This means that the remaining 91% ends up in lanfills and marine ecosystems, polluting our environment and killing our animals and marine wildlife with toxins arising from the decomposition of these plastics, and this directly affects us through the food chain and other factors.

Another issue could be that most of the environmental cost coming from plastic bags or reusable like; paper and cloth, comes from the production process with 60% of the environmental damage coming from the extraction of raw materials, and 25% coming from the production process. This means that for our reusable bags to have a positive impact they must be reused for a longer period of time than expected, for example a paper bag must be used 3 times and a cloth bag must be used a 131 times in order to equate a single use of a plastic bag. But this still doesnt mean that single use bags are the best option as they do have a worse damage on the environment, than paper or cloth bags after the production process.

So who is to blame? Well we cant just blame it on one individual or a group of individuals in the same sector, this is because most of the damage might come from the production process (so one sector) therefore, some might blame manufacturers,producers or firms, however it is not correct to fully blame them as they might be producing such objects or items that harm our environment, meaning they are partly to blame but not fully, as they wouldnt be producing these items if us as the consumer were not demanding them. This means that the blame is shared amongst all of us from manufacturers to businesses to consumers. Therefore as we have made this problem of plastic arise together, we should also solve the problem together and make things right again, together. This can be done through sharing our blame and guilt and through creating a more environmentally friendly system with sustainable production, and sustainable purchasing, where we think before we produce and we think before we buy.

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