“We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.” — Annie Marie Bonneau. If a chef can go down a zero-waste lifestyle, why can’t you? Not all people, of course, can afford to take this path because of financial issues or it’s their governments’ problem. Going zero waste has its problems right from the start. In some areas of developing countries such as Thailand, Philippines, India, Iceland, and China, some cities or towns are not as fortunate or able to reuse their waste and have to send it to the landfill, where they pile it up and go back to produce more waste. We, in the United States, have municipal services to take our trash away on a weekly basis, but some governments don’t have that. In developing countries, some cities spend no more than 0.5% of their per capita gross national productivity (GNP) on their waste services.
My name is Erika Chu and I’m a sophomore at SFSU. I’m majoring in International Business and even though this blog has nothing to do with my major, this topic interests me and I want to know more about going zero waste. I like baking, playing Candy Crush, gardening, and watching Chinese dramas. One of my other hobbies is journaling and in my free time, writing in my blog helps me destress. I need this space to keep all my research in or else, I think I might lose all the information I found. HAHA!!! Just kidding! Zero waste, what do you think of when I say those two words? When I first heard of it, I thought that it was impossible to not produce any waste because everything is packaged in any store you walk into. Basically, anything you buy is packaged. What if there was a smarter way to deal with the excess packaging? Besides reusing waste, what other ways do we deal with our waste? Yes, we send it to a landfill, but the excess is sent to other countries to deal with. Developing countries are already struggling in the first place and we shouldn’t add more fuel to the “fire”.
In her article, “By exporting trash, rich countries put their waste out of sight and out of mind”, Helena Varrkey reveals who’s at fault for producing all this trash and the problems in the developing countries. They want to persuade those countries to fight back to the point where they’re not taken advantage of. In another article, “Toward a Zero-Waste World”, Sherma Benosa talks about how different countries are taking similar approaches to adopt a zero waste lifestyle. They are working to develop new technology to help them in this process. There are already some machines doing the work, but I think that improving their technology is very important because it can speed up the waste process and transform them into something usable. They also mentioned how some countries in Europe cut down their waste by almost 50%. That is a big deal!
