I'm here to introduce Lauren Singer.

She is a graduate of NYU.

She comes to us from the East Coast.

And she was an environmental studies major in college

and a lot of her experience has helped her inform sort of where she is today,

living a zero waste lifestyle. So I will let her tell you all about that.

Please welcome Lauren Singer.

Singer: Can everyone see, hear, if I stand here?

Cool. So I always like to start out by just gauging who I'm talking to

and I'm wondering who here hasn't heard of living zero waste

or who was like dragged here by a friend.

So everyone, see, ha, cool. So who has heard of zero waste?

You've heard of it. Who here thinks zero waste is possible?

Who here thinks its impossible? Cool.

So, again, my name is Lauren Singer, and I'm here because I live a zero waste lifestyle

and I have for the past three plus years now.

And so, what zero waste means is actually different to all kinds of people.

I was talking with my friend Colin and another women at a panel

the other day and to some people, living zero waste is a structural thing,

to some people it's a political thing, and to me, living zero waste is a personal thing.

And to me, living zero waste means I don't create any trash,

or any landfill trash. So I don't send anything to landfill.

And again, I have been for more than three years now.

But I do recycle, but very minimally.

Because I don't really buy anything that needs to be recycled anymore.

And I do compost, which was one of my biggest forms of trash before I started doing that.

So all of this kind of started when I was in college.

Are you all guys undergrad? Anyone? Ok, cool.

So I started everything out, I was an environmental studies major

but I didn't really do anything environmentally until I was about a junior in college,

when I saw a documentary called Gasland, which was about the effects of hydrofracking on the environment.

And I was obsessed with the antifracking movement.

And I started protesting, and lobbying and doing all of these things to raise awareness about fracking

and I actually, if you look at this picture you can maybe spot me out

in the middle doing some fist stuff.

So, that was my junior year. It was all dedicated towards anti fracking.

My senior year of college was the last year that we had to kind of wrap up all of our environmental studies

because, as you mentioned I was an environmental studies major,

and one of the classes I was in, the environmental studies capstone course,

was the culminating course that you have to take in order to graduate

and you know, inform people about sustainability.

But there was a girl in this class that I had watched every single day

for the entire semester. And she would bring this big, big, plastic bag

full of plastic clamshell full of food, and a plastic fork and knife

and a plastic water bottle, and a plastic bag of chips

and she would eat everything and she would just throw it in the trash.

And I would be like oh my god your the worst person in the world. Right?

Because we're these environmental studies majors and this girl was making so much trash

and she was not even seemingly thinking about it.

She would just eat, and throw it away.

Even though we had a comprehensive recycling program

still just making all of this plastic trash and it really annoyed me.

And so, one day after class I went home to make dinner

and the same way I did every other night,

but for some reason something was different

and I opened my fridge and I noticed that every single thing I had in there was packaged in plastic.

And I don't know how many of you guys can relate with that?

Yeah. And I was really mad at myself.

And I was really sad. And I couldn't believe that I hadn't noticed that before.

Right? Because I was getting so mad at this girl for making so much plastic trash,

and it turns out that I was making just as much plastic trash,

I wasn't recycling everything,

and I was just as bad and a total hypocrite.

And so I felt really awful and I made a decision in that moment

to just stop using plastic. I didn't know how I was going to do it but I was just like done, cant.

And especially because I had been protesting the oil and gas industry

for so long and I was using one of their biggest byproducts.

And so that didn't align with me.

How could I be so vehemently opposed to an industry,

but still use one of their biggest by products?

There was a misalignment. So I decided to stop using plastic.

But, you guys basically all raised your hand,

so, if you could imagine, moving away from plastic is a probably difficult, right?

So, what I realized when I tried to do this

was that it was pretty easy for me to find stuff like food packaged free.

I went to natural food stores, co ops, and I was able to buy everything I needed in bulk.

But, what I couldn't find were things in other stores,

like pharmacies. I couldn't find plastic free shampoo,

I couldn't find plastic free toothpaste. So what I realized was I couldn't just buy

my way out of using plastic. I had to learn how to do a bunch of things

and making these products myself.

And so, when I started doing research

for these recipes, because obviously I didn't know how to make anything myself.

I didn’t know how to make toothpaste or deodorant or shampoo or anything.

I don't know many people who do, and if you do your really cool.

So when I started doing this research I found this blog called zero waste home,

started by a women named Baya Johnson.

Who has seen that blog before?

Who hasn't seen that blog before?

I like the more hands questions so...

So, Baya is awesome. She's this women who lives in Mill Valley in California.

And she has two kids and a husband, and a dog,

and the five of them live totally zero waste.

And I had never heard of living zero waste before

and I thought that for me, going plastic free, yes, I'm awesome

I'm doing this thing for the environment.

Like, I hate plastic and the oil industry

so I’m going to stop using plastic and I'm done. I'm good.

But, learning that I had the opportunity to take that one step further

and not produce any trash at all,

that was so inspiring to me because, again,

I studied environmental science and my life long goal

is just to have a positive environmental impact on the Earth,

and to leave it a better place than it was when I entered it.

And to me living zero waste has been the best way

to align that sentiment and those values

with my day to day life. Otherwise, I was just living in a way

that would contribute to the depletion of earths resources

and not actually doing anything to help.

And so, I decided to follow in Baya's footsteps and go zero waste.

So, again, a lot of you raised your hands thinking that going zero waste is really difficult,

and I'm sure you still think that.

I haven't really explained the process yet.

But it turned out that going zero waste was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be.

One of the biggest things I did, and something that already started to do

when I was going plastic free, was shop package free.

So, I learned how to buy all of my fruit and vegetables at the farmers market.

And you guys live in Washington,

you have one of the most amazing places to get food from.

I'm super jealous. You can harvest mushrooms in your back yard,

that's really cool, I can't do that in Brooklyn.

And so, I also learned how to do things like shop at the co op and natural food store

and bring my own bags to fill up with things like grains

and I stopped buying new clothing.

So everything that I wear and everything that I own is second hand.

I don't purchase any new clothing anymore

because there's enough clothing already in the waste stream

so I feel the need to use what's already out there and adequately dispose of it

like doing things like textile recycling or mending things that are just a little bit ripped

or a little bit broken instead of throwing them away.

I learned how to do things like make my own products.

So I finally learned how to make the toothpaste,

and make the deodorant, and the shampoo.

And by doing those little things over time

it turns out that I was able to reduce all of the trash

that I was producing. And who still thinks this is hard?

So, when you hear zero waste it seems really daunting and impossible

because it's a big umbrella term.

It's like hearing the word climate change.

No one really understands what that means because it's a huge term

and it's not broken down for us.

But when you actually look at living zero waste,

and you bring it down into it's pieces,

its actually a lot of little one time or baby changes

that have a long term positive impact.

And when I started doing this I did it for myself,

and not for anyone else. I did it because I wanted to live

within my aligned values. But I'm lazy, like super lazy.

And I wouldn't have continued doing this

if it was hard or impossible or frustrating

or if it just like doesn't match with my personality.

And so I realized that actually living this lifestyle improved my life

and that's why I continue doing it.

So the first benefit of living this lifestyle is that I actually save a lot of money.

Just talking about second hand clothing,

I save so much money by doing just that.

I mean even that change alone has saved me I'm sure thousands of dollars

over that past three years.

If you think of something as simple as a pair of jeans,

you can go to a department store and buy a pair of jeans for like $200,

which to me is like sickening and horrible and I hate that

and shouldn't be the case.

Or, I could go to Goodwill and get a totally good pair of jeans

for a dollar, $5, $10.

So even with that, that was one of the first ways I saved money,

I also saved money by learning how to plan ahead.

So before I started living this lifestyle,

I was in college, and I didn't really plan.

Because as college students were kind of like always just doing the next thing,

and just scratching to get all these things done and that's it.

But when I actually slowed down

and I started thinking about the things I was purchasing,

especially when it came to food, because you know when I was in college

I would go into my fridge and realize, oh my god, it's two in the morning

and I have nothing. So I'd have to go to the corner store and buy crap

packaged in plastic and eat ice cream for dinner because

that was the only option I had.

And so when I slowed down and started living zero waste,

which also meant living package free,

I learned how to make a shopping list, and with a shopping list you go in with a plan.

And so I wasn't just impulse buying when I went into a store.

I was looking at cookies and being like hey you cookies,

your coming home with me. It wasn't like that at all.

It was almost like, I want salads for dinner every night,

and I'm doing this this week.

And so, just by making those purchasing decisions,

I was able to save money because I wasn't spending money on

things that I didn't need. I also saved a lot of money by making my own products.

So toothpaste, for instance, I think is a really good example

because if you want to use natural toothpaste,

a thing of toms, I think is like $7.

Can anyone confirm that? $7, 6 or 7 dollars.

Yeah, for me to make my own toothpaste its about 20 to 30 cents

for the same amount of product

and there's no packaging, there's no shipping involved in bringing a product to a store,

so I don't have to walk to a store, so again it's perfect for lazy me.

So I have all the ingredients I need to make these things

in my house. So, something like that saves me a ton of money.

The second thing is I eat better.

So again I mentioned going to the store and going in with a plan,

and because of that I wasn't making,

or I'm not making impulse decisions.

So I can't buy processed, packaged junk anymore

because I choose to shop package free.

And lucky for me and my body,

that stuff doesn't come package free really.

And if I do want to eat something that's sweet,

I'll either make it myself or I'll go to a place like a bakery

that's not using preservatives or synthetic ingredients,

or, believe it or not, some foods actually have petrochemicals