It’s good to live like a zero
Among new book’s tips: use your own mug at the coffeeshop, no more bottled water, shop with reusable bags
From reusable shopping bags to avoiding bottled water, author Shia Su offers tips on sustainable living and how to cut the amount of garbage you generate to practically nothing.
Sustainable living
› Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash By Shia Su Skyhorse Publishing | $23.99
Have you ever stopped to think about how much trash you create? If you have, it’s likely something that resulted in an involuntary shudder.
According to statistics, the average American disposes more than four pounds of garbage per day. Now, that’s a lot of trash.
Canadian author Shia Su (who now calls Germany home) is hoping to help people reduce their garbage output with the new book Zero Waste: Simple Life Hacks to Drastically Reduce Your Trash.
Just in time for Earth Day (today, in case you weren’t aware), Su chatted with Postmedia about going waste free, her top tips for doing just that and why she wrote the book in the first place.
Q What made you want to write this book?
A I wrote this book with the voice of one of my best friends since high school in mind. She is a career woman with a busy schedule and a long commute in a committed relationship. She always said she’d love to have a more sustainable lifestyle but simply lacks the time to do the research and to DIY everything since she prefers to spend the little free time she has with her family and her husband. And I get it — who’s got the time, really?
She wanted a preferably skimable guide with simple hacks that she didn’t have to read cover to cover. So, I came up with the very visual beginner-friendly cookbook-like concept.
How does the book break it down?
It helps you get into the right mindset and provides background information, much like the introductory section of cookbooks explaining the particularities of a cuisine. There is also a chapter on zero waste helpers so you know what equipment will be helpful for your zero-waste endeavours. It’s helpful and very practical information, but if you don’t have the energy to deal with it, that’s fine too! You can just jump to whatever you feel is manageable for you at the moment, or whatever you feel drawn to when flipping through the pages, and try one or two easy swaps or a one-minute recipe.
When you set out to reduce your waste, what did you anticipate would be the biggest challenge?
To be honest, I am a very simple-minded person. I never intended to go zero waste. Like most people, I heard about zero waste and dismissed the idea as “too unrealistic” for me. However, my husband and I did want to reduce our trash and live a tad more sustainably. We simply tried one thing after another at our own pace. We never thought about what would be difficult or even impossible, because we assumed we’d only do what was within what’s manageable for us anyway. We actually made it a fun little challenge: “Let’s ask the sushi place around the corner if they are OK with putting our take out order into our own containers!” Or: “Let’s just ask the store owners, maybe they can order organic oats in a big paper bag for us!” Spoiler alert : We had the nicest conversations and ended up with a 25-pound bag of organic oats, a standing weekly sushi order in our own containers, and big smiles on our faces.
What are a few things we can all do to reduce our trash?
Most of the trash we create we create because we don’t pay attention. If you want to have your coffee at the coffeeshop anyway, order it “for here, in a real mug.” Bringing your own tumbler or a mug for your coffee to go isn’t a difficult task, either. After a few times you’ll get the hang of it — I promise! A lot of coffeeshops actually give you a discount if you bring your own reusable mug, they just don’t advertise it. And if you’re a coffee lover: coffee tastes so much better from a real cup, anyway. Paper cups spoil great coffee if you ask me. Saying no to straws when ordering your drink doesn’t even take any preparation. Try to buy produce in bulk instead of pre-packaged, hit the bulk section with some reusable cloth bags instead of using the plastic bags there, and — if your work schedule allows you to — go to the farmers market. The Vancouver Farmers Markets are amazing, and you can get fresh local produce basically all-year round. Support your local farmers, support small local businesses. Once you got used to it there’s no going back.
What’s the single most impactful thing we can do to change/or simply the one item we should all stop throwing away?
If I had to choose one, I’d say bottled water. Bottled water just doesn’t make a lot of sense: all we have to do to get our hands on clean water is to turn on a faucet. The water literally comes to our homes, basically for free. Yet — as the comedian Lewis Black already pointed out years ago — that’s apparently more convenience than we can handle. We prefer to “drive, and drive, and drive, and look for water! Like (our) ancestors did!” We prefer to buy water in plastic bottles that leach harmful substances, and carry the water back to our homes as if we had, well, no running water. The craziest part is that we have great tap water in B.C.
Lastly, what do you hope readers take away from this book?
Living almost waste-free is no black magic, and it’s not about depriving yourself. In the end it’s nothing more than the sum of many small, doable changes that aren’t only good for the environment, but also help you live healthier and more mindfully. I feel it’s a lot like yoga. You start with the easy asanas, and you’ll start to notice positive effects very soon. Like with exercising, there are good days, and there are bad days. But you’ll always feel accomplished afterwards. After a while you can move on to more and more challenging things, and what seemed difficult in the beginning will feel like a breeze. And before you know it it’s part of your daily life and you couldn’t imagine your life any other way.