Blood, Rot and Despair: Reflecting on Living Zero Waste
In a personal photo essay, Sadie Fick describes the daily struggles that she and others have faced in attempts to live zero waste.
Story and Photos by Sadie Fick
June 12, 2021
I, Sadie Fick, 21, sit amidst heaps of plastic bags, shipping packaging, plastic containers and other miscellaneous sorts of waste I am keeping for future use in my apartment in Bellingham, Washington. Zero-waste principles tell people to refuse to take these sorts of waste into their lives, but I’ve found that this sort of clutter builds up unless I am willing to throw it all away.
It’s time to take out the compost. This weekly chore is never the most fun. Usually, there’s some moldy water at the bottom of the bin; some might drip onto the floor and need to be wiped up.
This week, the bag rips. Fuzzy coffee grounds, gobs of mac n’ cheese and an unidentifiable brownish liquid splatter on the ground. The smell of rot fills the kitchen.
Worse, paper towels aren’t a zero waste-approved solution. Wiping up the mess with a rag results in damp fingers, courtesy of the mystery rot juice, then time spent at the sink rinsing food bits out of the cloth and wondering if using a paper towel would have been better than using all this water.
Contrary to the aesthetically pleasing optimism of zero waste influencers, trying to live zero waste is often ugly and disheartening. Heaps of plastic and paper will clutter drawers and corners. Blood, rot and all manners of filth will become closer parts of everyday life. Despair over whether all this mess, expense and effort even makes a difference will rear its head.
Compost spills from a splitting sack onto the kitchen floor. While mishaps of this magnitude are unusual, composting food waste requires facing the realities of rot: gross smells, various molds, and strange water in the bin that needs cleaned out every time it is emptied. However, composting prevents food from breaking down in landfills and producing methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
I first heard of the zero-waste lifestyle three years ago, the summer before I started attending university. At first, zero waste felt empowering. I couldn’t change policy or bring back endangered species, but I could reduce my impact.
“The waste problem, the plastic pollution problem, is so severe,” said Anna Arensmeyer, a member of the Students for Zero Waste Club at Western Washington University (WWU). “[Zero waste] felt like a good way to take that in my own hands and do what I can.”
Taking responsibility for personal actions can create a sense of agency in the looming environmental crisis. However, it can be exhausting to constantly try to figure out what the most sustainable choices are without guidelines.
Lists of my zero waste goals from freshman year to now surround a book of speeches by teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. Some goals have been achieved, others show up again and again, and some have been abandoned, like using DIY toothpaste made from bulk ingredients.
Unfortunately, the guidelines of the zero waste movement are often off-target. Vilifying plastic straws is one example.
In 2015, a video of a turtle getting a plastic straw removed from its nose went viral, amassing over 41 million views to date. In the video’s wake, the zero-waste movement and others advocated for plastic straw bans. However, the main threats to sea turtles are being accidentally caught as bycatch or tangled in fishing nets, not plastic straws, said Gwen Larned, who founded WWU Students for Zero Waste and now works as a recycling coordinator in Los Angeles.
“But we didn’t fight for better regulation for fishing,” Larned said. “We fought to ban plastic straws.”
I hold the rough equivalent of my trash for a month. A classic zero waste photo is of all of a person’s trash from a month in a mason jar, an intimidating metric I’ve never been able to reach.
While attending WWU, Larned was a huge proponent of zero waste. She was the zero-waste coordinator for WWU’s Office of Sustainability for all but two quarters and was interviewed by every publication at WWU, including The Planet, about her advocacy.
Since graduating, Larned has stepped away from the zero-waste movement because of the disconnect between zero-waste “solutions” and reality.
One example of that disconnect is the notion that glass is superior to plastic, which Larned calls “silly bullshit.” Shipping food in glass containers creates more carbon emissions because it weighs more than plastic and plastic is also better to reuse because it doesn’t break, Larned said.
She has also had to confront the amount of privilege it takes to live zero waste, a topic I think about a lot. Bulk food and sustainable products are often organic and cruelty-free, which generally costs more.
Admittedly, there are some zero-waste habits that can save money, like using plastic grocery bags for trash bags or buying clothes at a garage sale. In fact, a good way to predict which zero-waste practices I still do is to see which ones save me money. Still, many zero-waste swaps cost more up front or require a person to spend time — and time is money.
Cleaning cloths and drying plastic bags hang on a clothesline made out of yarn in my kitchen. Jury-rigged and un-aesthetic is the name of the game for broke college student zero wasters.
Even if expense isn’t an issue, many communities don’t have access to places where these items are available. The first summer I returned home to Nebraska, I judged my family for how much packaged food we bought. Eventually, I realized we had nowhere near the access to bulk food I’d been enjoying at college. Back home, there was only a small farmers market and a group we’d joined that ordered bulk items, like flour, to split between members.
Eating fresh produce, especially from a farmers market, is better for the environment and the local economy and is healthier, Larned said. But she added that the expectation is also stigmatizing, as packaged food is critical for some people in order to feed themselves and their families.
Failing to meet the expectations of the zero-waste movement can cause disappointment and guilt.
More discouraging to me was realizing how little the lifestyle changes I was making actually mattered. As I learned about sustainability, I realized that making a difference as an individual requires sacrifice. It isn’t just giving up packaged food; it requires sacrifices like spending the winter holidays alone to avoid flying and not having children.
The food in my pantry after a grocery run. Some food is stored in the glass jars that are key to the zero waste aesthetic, but between the inaccessibility of bulk shopping during the pandemic, the time cooking from bulk ingredients takes, and the expense of bulk and organic foods, I buy a lot of foods in plastic or cardboard packaging.
Are we supposed to make this level of sacrifice? I don’t want to, but maybe when facing the existential threat of climate change it’s selfish not to.
For me and others, these realities can result in stress or despair.
Emotions like these, caused by the environmental crisis, are being studied by people like Teaghan Hogg, a PhD student focusing on eco-anxiety at the University of Canberra, Australia.
Hogg was part of a team who published a paper in March 2021 about the effects of eco-anxiety, eco-depression and eco-anger. They found that both eco-anxiety and eco-depression may contribute to poor mental health. However, eco-anger and eco-depression can inspire participation in collective environmental action. Eco-anxiety, on the other hand, can reduce environmental behaviors, such as recycling, petition signing and protesting.
At times in my zero-waste journey, eco-anxiety has made me avoid thinking about or doing anything involving zero waste because it reminded me of the looming crisis and how little I could do.
When eco-anxiety reaches debilitating levels, it may be a good idea to seek professional help, but Hogg said it’s not accurate to think about eco-anxiety as a type of clinical anxiety.
“The problem with making eco-anxiety a pathological or medical issue is that it then sends a message that it’s an unhelpful, maladaptive response to the climate crisis,” Hogg said. “It’s actually really rational because of the enormity of the problem we’re facing.”
Clinical anxiety is like refusing to live on a volcanic island because it might erupt someday, even though it’s been dormant for centuries. Eco-anxiety is like living on a volcanic island that has been sending up smoke plumes and being rightly concerned.
Some amount of eco-anxiety may also be helpful, Hogg said.
Too much and it can cause issues like sleeping difficulties, restrictive eating and less environmentally-conscious behavior. But, a little eco-anxiety can provide the push to engage on climate issues.
I clean my menstrual cup after use. Using a menstrual cup requires getting up close and personal with blood and other discharge, as well as taking time to regularly clean and sterilize the cup.
Like eco-anxiety, zero waste can be healthy for some and problematic for others. Zero-waste habits make Arensmeyer feel productive and satisfied as long as she acknowledges that it’s impossible to live completely zero waste.
Larned’s zero waste experience, however, was tied to mental health challenges. Larned started living zero waste after a bad breakup and sexual assault.
“That’s what sparked me really wanting to do zero waste,” Larned said. “It was like, ‘This is a thing I can do really well and it will give me a lot of control over my life,’ at a time when I didn’t have that much control.”
It took her years to make that connection. She has also realized that having a strictly zero-waste diet was a mask for disordered eating.
As for me, I sometimes feel like my zero-waste habits are just a way to slightly abate the guilt of living in the country that produces the second most global CO2 emissions, rather than something I actually believe in. Still, I think I’ve reached a sort of equilibrium after three years of oscillating between optimism and despondency.
I enjoy growing some vegetables for myself. I shove down the twinge of guilt when I throw away a plastic bag I could reuse but have ten of already. I dry my clothes on a clothesline when I’m not tired.
I water homegrown lettuce using a repurposed Starbucks bottle. Despite the trial and mess of other parts of living zero waste, some parts, like gardening, makes me feel good.
A popular zero-waste saying commonly attributed to zero-waste influencer Anne-Marie Bonneau is, “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.”
Hopefully, I will be able to truly believe in that again and have faith that individual change can create a culture where sustainability is the normal way of life.
But right now? I’m tired.
Sadie Fick is a third-year visual journalism major at Western minoring in psychology and sustainability. She is fascinated by which stories we tell and which we don’t.