Use the 3 Rs—and Then Some—To Eliminate Trash

Alex Steffen once said "there is no such thing as garbage, just useful stuff in the wrong place." William McDonough said "We're not talking here about eliminating waste, We're talking about eliminating the entire concept of waste." Seth Godin says "Zero is the new black. The Boston Globe took it to the extreme:

"Imagine an industrial system in which nothing ever really dies or gets discarded....In this perfect system, each unit of energy consumed would be somehow offset. Every industrial byproduct would reassemble into something useful and benign. Every beam of sunlight, scrap of garbage, and flush of the toilet would be pressed into service. No exceptions. Humankind would make obsolete the very concept of "waste."

The fact is, we have been sold a bill of goods by our current industrial system that basically runs on waste, on selling stuff to us but not being responsible for the garbage that comes with it. They basically have transferred the responsibility to you, the taxpayer, who has to pay for dumps and separate it for recycling. It is a big issue, bigger than just the waste, it is the energy made producing things that don't last, replacing bottles that get recycled instead of refilled, picking up shopping bags that get tossed instead of reused.

But it doesn't have to be that way, we don't have to take their garbage. Here are some tips for personally moving toward a zero-waste life, adding a few R's to the usual 3 with some help from Lotus Live.