Building a community
EQUALLY passionate about protecting the earth is former environmental journalist Aurora Tin.
Tin founded Zero Waste Malaysia (ZWM) as a Facebook group on Jan 1, 2016. In 2018, ZWM was registered as a national non-profit organisation.
As of Aug 26, the group has 28,163 members, with its FB and Instagram accounts having 10,000 and 6,000 followers respectively.
Tin says that around 1,000 new members join the group each month.
“People are aware of the degradation to our ecosystem but the question is, what can we do as an individual? A zero-waste lifestyle is an accessible, affordable and simple practice that anyone can adopt, that’s why we could grow rapidly in the past few years,” explains Tin, 31.
Currently ZWM is working on three projects: The Zero Waste Handbook, Zero Waste Speaker Team and Zero Waste Certification programme.
The handbook – which can be downloaded for free in four different languages (zerowastemalaysia.org/resources/) – provides simple, step-by-step guides to practising zero waste.
The Zero Waste Speaker Team consists of trained speakers who go to schools, companies and public events to spread zero-waste awareness.
Meanwhile, the Zero Waste Certification programme is where ZWM audits and awards companies and organisations that put efforts into waste reduction.
“While promoting the zerowaste lifestyle at individual levels in the past few years, we totally understand that practising this lifestyle is actually challenging in the current circular economy.
“This world is not designed for zero-waste living. Our vision is that everyone should be able to live a low-waste lifestyle effortlessly. To make this happen, our job as an NGO is to push for a system change by helping corporates in their transition to low-waste operations. That’s why we came up with the idea of the zero-waste certification system,” she shares.
Tin says that when companies go low or zero waste, they can significantly reduce their environmental impact, cut down cost and build better relationships with society. “Corporates are so powerful that when they start ingraining the zero-waste mindset into their operations, thousands to millions of their customers could benefit from it, thus leading to a lowwaste society,” she stresses.
Since ZWM announced the programme, several companies have shown interest in getting certified.
“We understand that it takes time to develop a credible certification programme, thus we will
start small and slow but our vision is big.
“We hope that one day, the programme will be credible enough to be recognised as a ‘must-have’ in the corporate world and the government sector,” says Tin.
She also hopes that the government will push for Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and give incentives to corporates that try to reduce waste. EPR is a policy approach whereby producers are given the responsibility for the treatment or disposal of postconsumer products.
“The global zero-waste movement might have started from the grassroots but it’s originally an industrial term that’s widely used in the supply chain.
“We believe that everyone’s effort is important but it’s so much more important to make producers accountable for what they produce rather than put the blame on individual consumers,” she says.