HOW TO REDUCE WASTE WITHOUT THE JUDGMENT.
Molly de Vries loves to sit around and talk trash. Where it comes from, where it ends up, how to make less of it. And when all else fails, how to transform it into something beautiful and useful.
A passionate advocate for living a (nearly) nondisposable life, de Vries opened her store, Ambatalia, in a recycled train container in the Mill Valley Lumber Yard in 2004, with goods designed to help reduce the wastefulness of single-use products. Sewn locally, alternatives such as bento bags and furoshiki cloths offer artful, reusable alternatives to plastic bags and have been touted by everyone from Martha Stewart to San Francisco’s own Heidi Swanson.
De Vries, her husband, Willem, and two of their three children live not far from the store in a rustic, comfortably cluttered 800-square-foot cottage nestled in the redwoods, next door to the house where De Vries and her six siblings grew up, an old hiking lodge built in the 1890s. Short on cash but long on creativity, her parents furnished their home with pieces found on the streets, flea markets and city dump. “We were the original repurposers, long before it became chic,” she says. “My lifestyle has been very influenced by my parents’ ability to find treasure in other people’s trash. And 98 percent of everything I have — from my toaster oven to my couch to my son’s drum kit — is something someone else didn’t want.”
As discarded stuff is one of de Vries’ obsessions, she takes concepts such as “farm to table” one step further. Her workshops — From Farm to Waste Stream— are regular events at Good Earth Natural Foods in Mill Valley, where she shares tips for avoiding excess packaging (“taking home all this gorgeous organic food in plastic bags is a big disconnect”) and overbuying (according to the National Resources Defense Council, Americans toss out nearly half the food we buy). She’s also an ambassador for organizations such as Fibershed (which applies locavore principles to textiles) and the 5 Gyres Institute, which focuses on the global problem of plastic pollution.
Yet for all of her passion and commitment, de Vries is strikingly nonjudgmental, especially as compared to more zealous members of what is called the zero waste community.
“If I’m completely honest, I’m not zero waste,” de Vries says. “Someone might come home with takeout burritos in a plastic bag, or we’ll end up with a package of Newman’s Own cookies. Life happens! And with a job and a family and so many things to juggle, we have to be gentle with ourselves.
“I think I come at this issue from more of an artist’s point of view,” she adds. “I’m not a minimalist. I’m even a bit of a hoarder. And I love to make things,” she says, pointing to an outfit she’s creating for a Fibershed fashion show, the pants sewn from loquatdyed, climate-beneficial wool (grown and woven locally), and the shoes sculpted from the hunk of a fallen
“I’m not a minimalist. I’m even a bit of a hoarder. And I love to make things.” Molly de Vries
madrone tree.
A former hairdresser (she used to encourage clients to buy shampoo in bulk), de Vries’ big trash epiphany occurred 14 years ago while watching the Steven Soderbergh film “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.”
“When the Andie MacDowell character was talking about where all the garbage in New York ends up, something triggered and I started noticing waste all around me. Straws, plastic-wrapped products at the grocery store, coffee cups with plastic lids — all this stuff that’s leaching into food sources and killing marine wildlife. We are simply not as connected to this issue of garbage as we should be,” cautions de Vries, who carries one of her products, the utensil roll, wherever she goes, whipping out chopsticks in Japanese restaurants to use in lieu of the disposable ones.
And to avoid the plastic containers used to package the mozzarella cheese she loves, she has bought rennet and vowed to make her own. “I know that’s not something everyone can do,” she acknowledges. “But even if one (person) just stopped using plastic water bottles, that could be really huge.”
De Vries’ soft sell has a way of sinking in. At home a few days later, I find myself noticing the quantity of produce and bulk items corralled in plastic bags, the bin of kitchen compost —consoling (at least it’s not headed for the landfill!) until you think of it as a holding tank for uneaten food, and the shell of baby kale nestled in a corner of the crisper. And it’s indisputable: Between where most of us are now and zero waste, there’s still a lot of ground to cover.