Is It Really Possible to Live Zero Waste?
Thanks for Sharing is the inspiring story of one woman who decides to join the sharing economy, and give up buying stuff. She and her family pledge to share as much as they can over one year, and give up ‘owning things’, instead they lend, rent and swap in this tale of ‘collaborative consumption’.
Read more on no-dig gardening and humane slug/snail deterrents. If you live with animal friends, read up on pet-friendly gardens (some recommended flowers and fruit trees are not safe). Also avoid netting to protect food (just leave some for wildlife!)
Avoid facing indoor plants to outside gardens, to help stop birds flying into windows.
Each chapter includes a different type of sharing (food, clothes, cars, furniture, the space around us) plus tips to help you share (including useful apps).
What makes this book different is that it’s a real funny read, and not at all preachy. Anyone from any walk of life is sure to be inspired.
She begins her experiment admittedly not really knowing much about her fridge’s ‘two salad drawers’ that were for food her grandmother would have said were ‘on the turn’. So begins and adventure where is learning as much as we will by the end of the book.
Eleanor is a one-woman guinea pig who dives straight into sharing everything from food to fashion to furniture. She makes it all incredibly accessible due to her engaging writing styles, and warts-and-all reportage. Tessa Clarke (co-founder OLIO sharing app)
Even with some hilarious misunderstandings and mishaps, I came away from reading this book, wanting to try sharing more regularly. Rebecca Heaps (founder of Tentshare)
Eleanor Tucker is a former creative and features writer for newspapers, who now writes on the sharing economy. Originally from Oxford, she now lives in Scotland.
The Story of One Family That Ditched Plastic
Going Zero is the interesting story of a family that decided to ditch plastic, after a bean bag burst in their garden, sending thousands of polystyrene beads everywhere. They shunned supermarkets (cooking all meals from scratch), bought second-hand clothes (polyester in new clothes is made from plastic) and make their own homemade cleaners.
Deciding to walk away from the ‘throwaway society’, today this family sends almost nothing to landfill, proving a well-lived life does not have to be ‘wrapped in plastic’.
If you ever pop round to ours and start randomly opening our kitchen cupboards, fridge or freezer, there’s food in there.
But it’s all in label-less jars, paper bags or sometimes even sacks for bulk items. At first visitors find the lack of familiar packaging quite unsettling.
How Satish Kumar Inspires Simple Living
Satish Kumar (whose book Elegant Simplicity is a real favourite) is a true inspiration of a man. Born in India, he ran away to become a Jain monk in his late teens. Satish really did live simply at the monastery. He didn’t have a bath for 9 years, he fasted regularly, even his ‘thick black hair’ was plucked out twice a year.
But although this did drop away a lot of worldly desires, what he really wanted was to cook and grow his own food, kiss a beautiful woman on the lips and inspire others to live simple sustainable lives they enjoyed.
So he ran away to travel the world as a peace pilgrim, before meeting his wife and settling in Devon, where for over 40 years he has edited a celebrated environmental magazine from his kitchen table (he also founded a small school). His life went from zero waste to a ‘bit more complicated’ but all for the good that it’s done to him and others!
Rather than offering ‘zero waste tips’ like switching to wind turbines or not buying stuff, he says just learn to love nature, and live in harmony with it. He says getting angry and campaigning against everything that is not green and good is ‘like churning sand to make butter’.
Throwing statues covered in toxic paint into rivers, does not solve racism, as it’s the same mentality (anger and resentment) that created it. And it doesn’t help the innocent marine creatures in the rivers, who get poisoned through not fault of their own.
When I speak of simplicity, I don’t mean a life of deprivation, hair-shirt living or hardship. I believe in a good life, in beautiful things, in arts and crafts and in sufficiency. This is why I put the word ‘elegant’ before simplicity.
We all need and should have a comfortable and pleasant life. But at the moment our complicated lives are no longer comfortable. If we are blessed with wealth, we can use it for caring for the Earth and her people. Satish Kumar
