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M11.5 Blog about a Zero Waste Life


After finishing this module, including watching the YouTube video about a young woman who chose to live a ZERO WASTE life, consider your household waste stream.
Are there changes that you might be able to make in your life to live a zero-waste life and enter your thoughts/ideas into your blog.

I found Lauren Singer's argument for living a zero-waste life highly compelling and surprisingly manageable. I had assumed that living a zero-waste life would require drastic lifestyle changes that would simply not be feasible for me at this time. However, I have been conscious of the waste I produce for quite some time and have already implemented many of the changes Lauren suggested in her Ted Talk. I have to give credit to my partner and close friends who have been a positive impact on me and taught me how to reduce my waste over the past several years. I have made several changes including using only reusable bags, buying food in bulk and at farmers' markets, and using a reusable water bottle. I have stopped buying take-out and minimized eating out to reduce the waste produced from the packaging and single-use utensils/plates. There are two areas that I am still trying to implement that I think would help me get to very close to living a zero-waste life. The first is composting. I live in a small apartment in Oakland, CA so it is very hard to compost because I have no outdoor space and Oakland does not provide composting services like other cities such as Marin have. I hope that wherever I move next will have composting services or my home will be able to accommodate composting, but for now, it is just not feasible for me to compost. The second area I would really like to work on is creating my own products at home to reduce my waste from product packaging. I try to buy products in bulk but I have a lot of cleaning, skincare, makeup, hygiene, and other products that come in plastic packaging that I have to replace many times throughout the year. I also think the products I am buying are not always healthy and good for me or my environment, even beyond the packaging. I would love to learn how to make more of my products at home so that I reduce my waste and I know exactly what I am bringing into my home and what my family and I are being exposed to. I think this is something I can start on right now and it is something I am definitely going to start working on over the next several months. I think it is a lifestyle change that will require a lot of planning and research, but it is important to me and something I have wanted to explore for a long time. Now that I have implemented so many other lifestyle changes in an effort to live more sustainably, I feel ready to take on this more involved change. 

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