Waste

Tool libraries offer access to a wide variety of specialty tools, recreation and outdoor equipment, kitchen gadgets, and more – without contributing to an individualist, wasteful and energy-intensive throwaway consumer economy. Tool libraries are also known as lending libraries or libraries of things.

Take action

• Find a nearby tool library with Local Tools' worldwide map Find Your Local Tool Lending Library.
• Check your local public library: many host small libraries of things in addition to books.
• Start a new tool library with Share Starter's kit Start a Tool Library or Library of Things, with tools and templates for nonprofits, social ventures, and public libraries. 
• If you have tools you rarely or no longer use, donate them to a local tool library.

Get inspired

• The Thingery movement in Vancouver, Canada is a growing set of community-owned libraries of things housed in modified, self-service shipping containers.
• Students at Edventure Frome in the UK started SHARE:Frome, which rents more than 1000 items at a low cost.
• The Brisbane Tool Library in Australia lends tools and actively advocates for reducing consumerism in Brisbane and beyond.
• The article The library of things: could borrowing everything from drills to disco balls cut waste and save money? profiles a number of successful, inspiring tool lending libraries across the world.

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Reduce packaging waste and emissions from shipping by joining or starting a bulk buying club: a group of people who periodically purchase food and other supplies wholesale from farms, food producers, and other suppliers. To have the greatest positive impact, choose local producers whenever possible. Otherwise, try to build direct relationships with trusted organic and fair-trade suppliers.

Take action

• Start a buying club with Start a Buying Club's detailed guide.
• Find bulk buying suppliers and other food coop resources from Sustain's Food Coops Map (UK).
• Use the Fair World Project's guide The New International Guide to Fair Trade Labels to distinguish authentic, transformative fair trade labels that support small-scale, ecological producers from "fair-washed" corporate co-opted labels.

Get inspired

• Melliodora near Melbourne, Australia, has been operating a home-based food coop once a week for 20 years, offering dry goods and a Community Supported Agriculture box from the founder's garage.
• The 350,000+ members of the Seikatsu Club in Japan order bulk supplies in groups of 8-10 households arranged into autonomous local branches. Their collective demand has established more than 600 local cooperative suppliers and catalyzed a movement for local, chemical-free food throughout the country.

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Community composting projects focus on collecting otherwise wasted food scraps and other organic material in towns and cities, and converting them into a rich soil amendment for local gardens, parks and other open spaces. Create a composting program to serve your community through your local government, a community-run initiative, or a business.

Take action

• Start a community-run composting initiative with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's resource page Community Composters, which features video trainings and guides applicable worldwide, and a map of community composting programs (US).
• Start a composting program run by your local government with the ILSR's handbook Yes! In My Backyard: A Home Composting Guide for Local Government, which shares lessons from 11 successful programs in the US and Canada with recommendations for local policies.
• Back to Earth: Composting for Various Contexts by Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, is a comprehensive guide to various composting techniques and approaches, focusing on Asia, where "more than half of the waste generated is organic", thus diverting and composting this is vital to achieving zero waste.
• Enlist local restaurants and businesses into your community composting program with Kompost Kids' guide How to Engage Businesses, which includes sample business agreements.
• Start a compost pile at a school with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Guide to Composting Onsite at Schools.
• Advocate for compost-friendly policies with ILSR's Composting Rules Library, featuring model composting policies adopted by communities and states in the US.
• Whether or not you have a yard, you can compost at home, or find a community composting program or a local business to take your food scraps.

Get inspired

• LA Compost, based in Los Angeles, US, runs 35 permanent compost hubs that also function as community centers.
• Revolução dos Baldinhos (Revolution of the Buckets) in Florianopolis, Brazil, is a community-based initiative that collects and composts 8 tons of organic matter each week.
• The Community Compost Cooperative Network in Washington, DC, US, run by the city government, has created 50 volunteer-managed composting sites with no operating costs.
• Capital Scraps in Canberra, Australia, is a social enterprise that picks up food scraps with cargo bikes and donates finished compost to schools and community gardens, as part of the SEE-Change Canberra WasteLess Working Group.
• GroCycle, based in Exeter, UK, diverts coffee grounds from landfills and transforms them into oyster mushrooms and compost.

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Choosing items that are biodegradable and long-lasting reduces the environmental burden of manufactured goods, both during production and when their useful lifetime has finished. In the words of Pete Seeger, ​“If it can't be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.”

Take action

• Purchase from companies that reject planned obsolescence and offer a lifetime guarantee on their products. For products that aren't made locally, the website Buy Me Once (US) is a directory of companies that intentionally design for durability.
• Consider objects that are made of natural fibers, stone, clay, bamboo, wood, or plants, rather than synthetic materials like plastic. Be cautious of chemical or plastic coatings, and use locally-harvested materials when possible! 
• Check out iFixit's instruction manuals and online community for help with repairing electronics.

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Creating a space for your community to come together and repair objects is not only a great way to keep waste out of the landfill and reduce consumerism, it can also create intergenerational bonding. At Repair Café events, people with specialized skills and knowledge come together to fix almost anything that's broken, from moth-eaten sweaters to smartphones. Originally started in Amsterdam, the concept has now spread around the world.

Take action

• Find a repair café near you with Repair Café's links to Community groups in the US, Europe, and Australia. There are many other grassroots communities around the world, too. 
• Start your own local group with Repair Cafe's Repair Café Manual and templates, offered for a modest fee. 

Get inspired

• Club de Reparadores in Argentina has helped organize more than 30 repair events in Buenos Aires, Río Negro and Córdoba, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay.
• The Bower Reuse and Repair Center in Australia has been in operation since 1998. Their mission is not only to reduce the amount of waste entering landfills by reclaiming household items for repair, reuse and resale, but also to provide affordable goods to low-income earners and to generate local employment.
• The Restart Project in the UK focuses on electric devices. They run regular Restart Parties where people teach each other how to fix their broken and slow devices – "from tablets to toasters, from iPhones to headphones."

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Trying to eliminate waste from your life is one way to reveal just how much unnecessary single-use packaging exists in the corporate food system. It's also a way to appreciate the multiple benefits of buying directly from local artisans, farms, and bulk food stores. You'll find that beyond reducing waste, you'll support your local economy and strengthen your community at the same time. 

Take action

• Check out 100 Steps to a Plastic-Free Life, by Beth Terry, author of Plastic Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too.
• See the Get Involved page on the Plastic-Free July website for dozens of practical guides on reducing or eliminating the use of plastic in your home, office, school, community, and local government.
• From Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth Malaysia), see the toolkit, Throwing Away the Throw-Away Culture, filled with lots of simple ways to reject plastics and to move a little closer towards zero waste.
• Sign the #WeChooseReuse commitment to move away from single-use plastic and put robust reuse systems in place.

Get inspired

• Beth Terry, author of Plastic Free, tells her inspiring story in this TED talk.
• Read about how Indian activist Bhim Rawat has been leading a plastic-free lifestyle for over 15 years.

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While Local Futures views economic localization as the most systemic solution to the waste problem, there are things that individuals, businesses and governments can do in the short term. Because they have a much larger impact than individual lifestyle choices, businesses can play an important role in shifting our societies' relationship with material goods by firmly embracing zero-waste principles.

Take action

• Read the guide Setting Up a Zero Waste Shop by Nicola and Richard Eckersley, founders of a zero-waste shop in Totnes, UK. 
• Check out this set of zero waste resources for businesses compiled by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).
• In Europe, join the #WeChooseReuse campaign as a business. This means putting zero waste at the core of your business model, choosing and prioritizing reusable over single-use products wherever possible, and calling on policymakers to support this shift.

Get inspired

• EcoPosro in Goa, India, is the state’s first zero-waste shop. Watch this ten-minute video to learn how they got started – and how their commitment to zero packaging waste led to sourcing products locally and using traditional food preservation methods.  
• Vestigium, a sustainability-themed community center in Zagreb Croatia, operates the country’s first zero-waste café, at which all the produce is locally-grown.
• Earth.Food.Love in Totnes, UK, is the country's first zero-waste food shop. Much of their inventory is locally sourced – with some of it biked to the shop by local farmers. There's a heavy emphasis on bulk products, but you'll have to bring your own containers. Read about The Shop Where Packaging is Banned.
• Get inspired by the stories shared in Business Unusual: Enterprises Paving the Way to Zero Waste, by GAIA Asia Pacific. The free download profiles 20 successful small enterprises across the region using innovative methods to reduce their customers' and their own contributions to the waste stream.

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Plastic waste, driven by the expansion of the petrochemical industry and the explosion of single-use packaging accompanying corporate globalization, has swelled to become a global ecological and health crisis, leaving no part of the biosphere uncontaminated. While individual action is important, tackling this crisis will require going far beyond that, and moving upstream to stop the responsible corporations and industries and prevent the production of this harmful material in the first place. It will also require reversing globalization, contesting corporate power, and rebuilding localized economies that require less packaging by nature.

Take action

• Join Break Free From Plastic - the global movement working to stop plastic pollution for good - as an individual, organization or business, and take action against plastic today with these resources and campaigns.
• In the US, learn about the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act - "the most comprehensive set of policy solutions to the plastic pollution crisis ever introduced in Congress" - and send this letter or make this call to your representatives to support the Act; spread the word with this social media toolkit; and sign your organization on to this letter in support of the Act.
• Make your campus plastic free with this guide from Break Free From Plastic.
• Send this letter from Beyond Plastics to urge stores to phase out single-use plastic packaging.
• Join the #WeChooseReuse campaign across Europe to help replace single-use plastics with reusable systems.
• See the Get Involved page on the Plastic-Free July website for dozens of practical guides on reducing or eliminating the use of plastic in your home, office, school, community, and local government.

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In many cultures and for many generations, human "night soil" was composted and returned to the fields on which food was grown. Modern sewage treatment facilities break that loop, using significant amounts of energy while depriving soils of much-needed nutrients. Composting toilets are a solution to these problems, though they are mainly appropriate in rural areas. Designs can range from very simple and inexpensive toilets that anyone can build, to manufactured models with off-the-shelf components.

Take action

• The authoritative guide to all things composting toilets is The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins. Learn and apply the basics quickly with the 12-page condensed instruction manual.
• Find 13 different models of home-built composting toilets – from the basic to the "fancy" – at MorningChores.com.
• This short video, Compost Toilets Online Course, from Low Impact TV, will tell you what you need to know to build your own simple composting toilet.

Get inspired

• In Ladakh, India, the ancient dry composting toilet, called the dechot, has been safely and successfully recycling valuable human waste into local soil fertility while protecting scarce water for centuries - a truly sustainable technology! This system is not a relic of the past, but a beacon of hope for the future; to learn more, read Tanya Dubey's article This ingenious toilet system in Ladakh could help India reach complete sanitation by 2022.
• In Kenya, 41% of the population lacks access to basic water services and 71% lack sanitary services. Kenya Connect is working to improve this situation by constructing composting toilets, with the first at two primary schools. The compost will be used on nearby gardens and trees.
• Compost toilets are catching on in more industrialized settings too. Read about rise of the no-flush movement in the UK by Emine Saner, and about applications in the US in What We Waste When We Flush the Toilet, by Deb Habib and Ricky Baruch.

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Given the scale of the waste problem, we can't simply rely on individuals to change their behavior or businesses to voluntarily internalize their environmental costs. We also need to push for policies that will, in the long run, have far greater impact. Many of the most systemic policies can be found in the topic Resisting corporate globalization, but there are some valuable policy shifts regarding waste that will help lessen the problem. A ban on disposable plastics is one.

Take action

• Join Break Free From Plastic - the global movement working to stop plastic pollution for good, and take action against plastic today with these resources and campaigns.
• In the US, learn about the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act - "the most comprehensive set of policy solutions to the plastic pollution crisis ever introduced in Congress" - and send this letter or make this call to your representatives to support the Act; spread the word with this social media toolkit; and sign your organization on to this letter in support of the Act.
• Plastic Pollution Coalition's Global Legislative Toolkit "provides a complete suite of resources, successful initiative examples, and strategy development options" to eliminate the global reliance on disposable packaging. The toolkit can be searched by region, or by laws and policy approaches to different plastic waste sources.
• The Plastic Pollution Coalition has assembled activist toolkits and guides for creating campaigns and policies to ban plastics in your municipality.
• Learn how to lobby for a single-use plastic ban in your community with Greenpeace's Not In Our Town toolkit.
• Rise Above Plastics Activist Toolkit and Plastic Bag Law Activist Toolkit, by the Surfrider Foundation, will help you create a successful campaign to enact ordinances to ban disposable plastic bags in your town.
• Send this letter from Beyond Plastics to urge stores to phase out single-use plastic packaging.
• Join the #WeChooseReuse campaign across Europe to help replace single-use plastics with reusable systems.
• Create a Bag It Town Campaign to ban plastic bags in your town with this toolkit from the makers of the film, Bag It: Is Your Life Too Plastic?
• The Columbia University Climate School offers tips for campaigners seeking to ban plastic bags.
• Upstream (US) provides sample policies – at the local, state and national levels – to require reusable foodware for in-site dining, take-out, and delivered meals.
• Join #SkipTheStuff, a US-based campaign organized by the National Reuse Network, to enact policies requiring restaurants to “ask first” before adding unnecessary stuff to your take-out order – straws, plastic utensils, condiment packets, napkins, etc.
• Make your campus plastic free with this guide from Break Free From Plastic.

Get inspired

• Nilgiris District in Tamil Nadu, India has one of the strongest disposable packaging bans in the world, covering laminated brown paper and boxes, foil, cling wrap, and much more. After banning all drinks in plastic bottles, the town installed 70 public drinking water taps to provide clean water for all. Read more about Nilgiris’ story in the Deccan Chronicle, the Times of India, and the Hindu Times.
• The tiny island nation of Vanuatu has one of the strongest national plastics policies in the world. First to go were single-use plastic bags, drinking straws and Styrofoam food containers. This was followed by a ban on disposable diapers, plastic cutlery and grocery packaging like netting and clamshell cases. Read more in the article Vanuatu Has One Of The World’s Strictest Plastic Bans. It’s About To Get Tougher by Nick Visser.
• Rwanda is the first African country to ban single-use plastics. The ban affects plastic bags, wrappers, containers, bottles, straws, cutlery, folders, and balloons. Even plastic duty-free bags can't be brought into the country. Read more in the article Rwanda bans all single-use plastic by Ivan R. Mugisha.
• As part of an effort by Canada to reach zero plastic waste by 2030, the country will ban single-use plastics – bags, straws, stir sticks, and six-pack rings – by the end of 2021. Read more in the article Canada will ban single-use plastic items by the end of next year by Simret Aklilu.
• In 2019, the European Parliament passed a law banning a number of throwaway plastic products, including single-use plastic cutlery (forks, knives, spoons and chopsticks), single-use plastic plates, plastic straws, cotton bud sticks made of plastic, oxo-degradable plastics and food containers, and polystyrene cups. The law won overwhelming approval, with 560 MEPs voting in favor, and only 35 against.

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Taking collective policy-based action at the town, city or municipal levels is one of the most effective ways to make transformative change towards zero waste at the pace and scale needed to tackle the crisis.

Take Action

• The Zero Waste Master Plan, by GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives) is a toolkit for "policymakers, sustainability professionals, environmental advocates, and grassroots organizers leading their cities into a green and just future through zero waste."
• The Zero Waste City Manual A Toolkit to Establish City and Community Zero Waste Systems, by the Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group in India is "a practical guide for the implementation of a zero waste system that emphasizes decentralization, source segregation, resource recovery, and informal sector inclusion."
• Enabling Sustainable Cities Through Zero Waste: A Guide for Decision- and Policy-Makers, by GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives), "presents a list of Zero Waste policy recommendations for local government officials as well as for national officials and policy makers," focused on the Philippines but widely applicable.
• Municipalities for Reuse: Calling for robust systems change at the community level, is a resource from #WeChooseReuse to help European municipalities demand support from decision makers at the EU level for reuse and zero waste policies.
• For Decision Makers: Supporting reuse systems through bold policies and laws, is a set of demands by #WeChooseReuse for policymakers at the European level to restrict single-use, disposable plastics and encourage and incentivize reuse systems.
• Zero Waste Europe's Waste Policies and Best Practices is a library of resources for waste reduction at source, repair, reuse and recycling.

Get inspired

• Case studies from Guatemala, Chile, Philippines, Malaysia, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Spain, and more can be found in GAIA's Zero Waste World project, documenting how communities across the world are transitioning to zero waste.

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