The Hidden Impacts of Zero Waste Solutions

Imagine this real quick. Imagine we wake up and start our day with high quality, reusable, and sustainable zero waste solutions. We brush our teeth, floss, clean our ears, blow our nose, do our make up, all while creating zero waste.
 

We continue going about our day eating our food from unpackaged and locally sustainable sources. We are drinking coffee, tea, or water in reusable cups and mugs instead of disposable paper or plastic versions. 

We get to and from our destinations with a minimal footprint whether it be walking, biking, taking the train or bus, etc. Then we go home to a rather sustainable and low impact place to lay our heads where we get to do it all over again the next day. 

Alright, that didn’t take too long right? Let’s now ask ourselves: how did this scenario make us feel? For most of us who’ve began to think about our impact on the world, it probably felt pretty good. 

Maybe for some of us it was tough to picture this lifestyle because it feels so far away. How are we to simply snap our fingers and suddenly become perfectly sustainable? The answer is we don’t, which isn’t a surprise.

As we may know, good things take time. When we want to change our lives for the better, what matters most is making changes, not how quickly or how much we’re changing. This is where choosing a zero waste solution comes in. 

While a cotton swab is a rather small thing, so many are created and discarded in the world. They use resources, demand fossil fuels, and pollute our oceans and environment. But there’s another impact, and that’s the one it has on our lifestyle and mindset. 

When we begin to use a product like LastSwab every day as a zero waste solution, something changes. We start to change how we treat “things” and begin to realize the impacts of our everyday actions. By changing things that we do every day, we are creating a new habit that will eventually become the norm. This allows us to progress even further. 

The more we start using reusable things like ones from LastObject or elsewhere the more we start to look at our lives even beyond zero waste. We start to look at our impact as a whole, but it all started from something simple, like a cotton swab.

When we reduce our waste of physical things we are reducing our measurable footprint, but we’re also creating a domino effect that overflows into all aspects of our lives. Here is a nice visual of the zero waste domino effect.  

Thinking about our disposable cotton swabs or tissues could lead to thinking about our water bottles or plastic bags.

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This could lead to thinking about food packaging.

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Which could lead to thinking about the impacts of our diet.

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Which could lead to thinking about how our food gets to where it is.

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This could get us thinking about our own transportation habits.

And so on.

The point being, our way of thinking changes especially when we do something everyday to change it. To ensure that those changes continue, it is always better to start small (in this case literally) so that we aren’t overwhelmed and then give up all together.

Let us not worry about becoming so sustainable as quickly as possible. Instead let’s focus on what is attainable and what can be continued throughout the rest of our lives. Let’s focus on the things that will create a foundation and set the stage for other changes, big or small. Because without a foundation, we may end up toppling over if we try and pile too much up. 

Thinking about our day to day actions is simply a “muscle” that we have to flex in order to maintain. This is why zero waste solutions are so powerful because they get us to start flexing this muscle.

When we begin to think of new and creative ways to change, that muscle is going to be feeling pretty great, and so will the Earth.

Change our everyday actions in order to change our lives and maybe, just maybe, the world will change with us.