China Daily Global Edition (USA)
‘Waste not, want not,’ minimalists say
As an eco-minimalist, Su Yige has maintained an environmentally friendly and sustainable lifestyle for the past three years while studying in Canada. She takes her own bag when she goes grocery shopping and uses second-hand items as often as possible.
As she has attended online classes at home in Toronto for the past year, Su hasn’t used any sanitary napkins and avoids almost all paper-related products unless she has to use a public toilet while away from home.
However, her eco-friendly actions have often led to the 23-year-old being mistaken as Japanese.
Initially, she believed it was a result of similarities in Asians’ appearance in the eyes of many Westerners, but after long observation she has concluded that it is based on “environment-related racism against Chinese people”.
That conclusion prompted her to launch an environmental video blog as a platform to address this perceived racism.
She didn’t expect that the move would lift the curtain on the ongoing story of how she and many other young Chinese enthusiastically lead and promote a lifestyle that aims to minimize waste.
Diligence and thrift are time-honored traditional Chinese virtues. Su’s family is a good example of this, according to the native of Weihai, Shandong province. Although they have little formal “green” knowledge, her parents lead a very environmentally friendly life.
For example, the family has used the same hair dryer for more than a decade, and Su remembers many of her mother’s clothes from as far back as kindergarten. “As long as something can still be used, my mother will not replace it with a new item,” she said.
Before going to Canada six years ago, Su thought Western countries performed well in terms of environmental protection. “What I found, however, was far from my expectations,” she said, citing excessive packaging and waste in supermarkets as examples.
The waste is so bad that a lot of edible food is dumped in trash bins outside supermarkets, she said. Despite that fact, she sees a prejudice against Chinese people from an environmental perspective.
Many dramas from the United States show young Chinese leading extravagant lives, while environmental news related to the country, though positive in itself, often attracts negative comments online, she said.
The idea of launching an environmental vlog came when she failed to find many examples of such content on Chinese social media platforms, though it is common on the internet in the West.
She probably would not have put the idea into practice so quickly if she hadn’t been mistaken as Japanese again in March last year, when she was cleaning up an area strewn with litter while taking a walk. A Canadian man, who stopped running and joined her, asked if she was from Japan. Dressed in regular clothes, she could find no reason for the mistake. “I suddenly realized that it’s hard to break the prejudice,” she said.
Perseverance
Through her vlog, Su soon found that she was not alone in living a sustainable lifestyle.
At the beginning, very few people watched the films she uploaded to video-sharing site Bilibili. However, her perseverance over the past year has paid off as many of the 23 videos she has made have been viewed about 20,000 times.
In one of her videos, she shows how to make reusable beeswax food wraps. In another, she illustrates the process of making natural washing powder.
She has amassed over 10,000 followers in a minimalist group she set up on Douban, China’s major review platform. Almost 500 of her die-hard fans have also joined a WeChat group she established, where they share environmental information and exchange objects they no longer need.
Encouraged by Su, many members of the WeChat group have ratcheted up their efforts to lead environmentally friendly lives.
For instance, Ding Nan from Xiamen, Fujian province, has said goodbye to all bottled drinks and restaurant takeouts. No matter where she goes, she carries a reusable plastic box so she can avoid disposable plastic containers.
Even before she met Su online, the 23-year-old, who graduated from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing last year, had been endeavoring to make her parents more aware of environmental issues.
She scored an early success, though it sparked a series of small quarrels initially.
“I frequently asked my father to bring the plastic bag back home after dumping our waste in the trash bin. He was unhappy, and argued that instead of making that request, I should go downstairs to dump the waste myself,” she said.
In another move, her father criticized her for doing too much shopping online. Eventually, they both made steps toward becoming better environmentalists.
Her father brings the bag back for reuse and she has only bought two pieces of clothing online in the past six months.
Growing trend
More Chinese are adopting environmentally friendly, sustainable lifestyles. Hou Liqiang reports.
While carefully classifying garbage at home, even sending trash as small as plastic tissue wrappers to a recycling company, Beijing housewife Mai Mai has been turning kitchen waste into compost, which she applies to a vegetable plot on some land she rents.
Overall, the 37-year-old now ensures that roughly 80 percent of the waste generated in her home is recycled.
In addition to encouraging her family to reduce waste, Liu Xiaodan from Tianjin has persuaded the head of the general office at her company not to provide bottled water during meetings.
When she has raised enough money, the 32-year-old plans to open the first zero waste store in Tianjin.
Back in Canada, Su is looking forward to finding a job related to sustainable development in China after she graduates as a computer science major in the summer.
She wants to keep her environmental vlog running to make full use of her spare time.
What drives her to continue the time-consuming activity that provides no financial benefit is the hope of breaking the perceived environmental prejudice against Chinese people.
She wants to make her platform more influential and is looking forward to cooperating with vloggers from overseas in an attempt to address the perceived prejudice by sharing her personal experiences.
As far as she is concerned, personal experience is something that “will definitely resonate with Westerners”.