NON-FICTION A Family Guide to Waste-Free Living Lauren & Oberon Carter Plum/Pan Macmillan Australia, $34.99

It’s the ultimate zero-waste status symbol. A glass jar on the kitchen bench as your only household waste receptacle. There’s no kitchen bin, no bathroom bin, no office bin. There is only the jar, on display for all to see.

Perhaps Australia’s best zero-waste achievers are the Carter family of Taroona. Their 700ml glass jar is not even full. After three years.

Lauren and Oberon Carter, both 43, live on an average suburban block with their three daughters, Audrey, 15, Xanthe, 12, and Maisie, 8.

In 2015, the family entered a challenge set by not-for-profit group Sustainable Living Tasmania and went completely waste and recycling-free for two-weeks. After winning the challenge, they continued. The family went from producing 100 pieces of recycling and about 100 pieces of landfill rubbish a week to none.

Now the couple has zeroed in on waste reduction with a beautifully produced book, Family Guide to Waste-Free Living, which is coffee-table gorgeous with photography by Natalie Mendham and full of great tips for reducing household consumption and its detritus.

The Carters share their story of ditching buying food in packets to buying products in bulk in reusable bags or containers. They shop at farmers’ markets, they have chickens and they go fruit picking as a family outing.

The family didn’t eat cheese for a year until they found a way to purchase it without plastic packaging. Tinned tuna is one of the few items they now do not consume at all.

Any paper or cardboard products brought into their home end up in their fireplace or used as sheet mulch in their garden. They make many products from scratch, including toothpaste, deodorant, hair wax and cleaning spray. Even their clothing is plastic-free (so no polyester) and is instead made from wool, cotton or bamboo, which will eventually be turned into rags for cleaning and then sheetmulched in the garden for weed control.

“When we buy things we look at lastability and repairability,” Oberon, an ecologist, says. “We buy shoes we can repair rather than shoes with moulded soles that you can’t fix. Zero waste seeps into all of our purchases.”

AA key message in the book is the need for consumers to totally rethink recycling.

“People think there are no negative impacts from recycling, but it still uses a lot of resources and there are very few products you buy that are actually made of recycled plastics,” says Oberon.

“It’s a positive thing that China stopped taking our recycling because it made Australia realise it has a responsibility for the waste that it produces. [China stopped accepting recyclables and other waste from foreign countries including Australia last year.]

“It’s not OK to send it away and make it someone else’s problem.”

Zero Waste Tasmania, a group launched by the Carters, now has nearly 10,000 members, and has kicked off other zero-waste groups around the country.

Lauren Carter, who runs an online zerowaste store and education site called Spiral Garden, says the family’s weekly budget has remained the same.

“We have saved a lot of money from buying in bulk, picking fruit, growing our own, and we

always start out looking for second-hand,” she says. “Some of the handmade products we buy are more expensive but it balances out. Some things are way cheaper.”

The authors have taken great care to avoid preachiness.

They introduce their guide by explaining that for them, waste-free living means bringing nothing into their home that they can’t consume, compost or repurpose. Instead of asking is it landfill or waste, they ask whether or not an item is compostable.

“We’re not doing anything radically new … What we’re embracing in these pages is a return to slower, simpler times,” they write.

The guide is a wonderful resource for anyone setting out on a waste-reduction journey or deepening a commitment to cutting back on overall resource use.

It is not only inspiring and well written and designed, it portrays the whole shift as a wonderful, bonding family adventure — right here in southern Tasmania.

ELISSA LAWRENCE and AMANDA DUCKER