The misconceptions about zero waste and how living your values can change your career.
An excerpt of a profile with Andrea Sanders from Be Zero Waste
Interview by Kyle Calian
Photography by Jena Anne
Edited by Ashley Goetz
Q: Describe your path to what you’re working on now.
A: What I’m doing now is about reconnecting individuals to what they value. How can we bring more value into our lives, and how can we see things as more valuable? We’ve been so disconnected from our waste. This disconnection has us not valuing materials anymore — the things we buy or the clothes we wear or the communities we live in … the resources we take advantage of every day.
When did you start really thinking about the value of things?
I spent a lot of time before Be Zero in meditation and yoga. I spent 10 years teaching mindfulness meditation, and one of the things I learned was the idea of developing a relationship with my own mind and developing relationships with the things around me. I had to ask myself, what is my relationship with myself, with the people around me, with nature. Where was I disconnecting, and how could I rebuild those relationships?
I thought about my grandparents a lot, how they used to live and how much they appreciated the things they owned. I came to realize there was this lost sense of value in things. I would buy some fast-fashion cheap clothes that would rip a couple days later, and I wouldn’t think anything of it. I started to really piece all this stuff together for myself, and that helped me see this collective disconnect. It’s not that we don’t know, or we don’t care. I think we’ve just become unplugged. My work is getting people to plug in and rethink these concepts for themselves.
When did you start working on sustainability issues?
When I was 14 growing up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, I was really interested in the environment and was getting really upset when people in the neighborhood cut down trees. There was a local marine life research center called Mote Marine Laboratory. They had a volunteer program that gave me the tools and resources to talk to the community, and I really fell in love with it. I loved sharing knowledge about nature, framing it in a way that was interesting for people and seeing [their] reactions to being around marine animals for the first time. That was when doing this work really started to settle in my mind.
How long have you been zero-waste?
Since 2007, when I started the journey. That was around the same time Bea Johnson started her blog, Zero Waste Home. I had stumbled across that, and it was just such a gasp, oh my goodness — here I am teaching environmental conservation, and yet look at all this waste I’m making at home. Nothing I was doing at home had any connection to what I was teaching, so that was definitely a wake-up moment. I wasn’t putting all my trash in a jar in 2007, but I was definitely starting to really think about what I was purchasing and where things came from.
What about some of the misconceptions around zero-waste?
I think when people hear the phrase zero-waste they automatically think they can’t make any trash. They get stuck on the word zero. In our culture we create these boxes and labels, so if you don’t do all the things according to this societal label, you don’t belong. Zero waste is just an industrial term that refers to a type of economy that has to do with designing things that don’t produce waste as an end product. Some people call this the circular economy, some call it zero waste.
When I tell people this, they’re usually very relieved. We live in a linear economy. Our global infrastructure right now is based on planned obsolescence and designing things [to be] repurchased. So, you’re going to make trash. It’s going to happen in some capacity. There is no foolproof, perfectly ethical way to to do this, because the infrastructure that surrounds us isn’t built for a circular economy. It’s beautiful to think about, but we’re just not there yet.
All I’m focusing on is getting people to rethink their waste, reduce their waste, become empowered consumers and empower their communities. It’s about re-plugging in and swatting away the misconception that you cannot make any waste or ever touch plastic again.
Meet people where they are, and let them know that wherever they’re at is OK. Do something. Be intentional. Be Mindful. Be Compassionate. Don’t worry if not everything is aligning. Doing something is better than not doing anything.
Walk me through an average day.
I work for myself, so I usually wake up slow. I love to make coffee at home, or my husband and I will grab our to-go cups and head to the local coffee shop — my favorite being Alpine Modern. I try to write in my notebook before I jump on my laptop, or I’ll do some art. Then, I usually have meetings with people in the community or participate with other nonprofits. I also do a lot of orientations with the Be Zero ambassador program. I’ll take a break in the afternoon and get back to work at night.
What about prep-work for meals?
I try to make my food very simple, especially in the wintertime. I focus on root vegetables like sweet potatoes and potatoes, onions and carrots. Since I don’t usually buy food in packaging, I add those root vegetables to dried stuff like rice, quinoa or pasta. I’m a big fan of the one-skillet meal. The less I have to do the better.
I freeze a lot of vegetables in the summertime, so those are really easy to dethaw — everything from kale to pesto, peppers and tomatoes. I always have fresh summer vegetables in the middle of winter. One of the biggest things I’ve learned from shifting to a more circular mindset is to be resourceful. You don’t need to spend a lot of time if you utilize tools like pressure cookers or cast iron skillets and think about how quickly you can prepare a really good meal without producing any waste.
How did you start Be Zero?
I was doing this mindfulness exercise to reduce my own waste but didn’t talk about it very much. I remember it very clearly. I was standing in the kitchen and said to myself, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to share this with everybody, now.” So, I retired from teaching yoga and meditation and just started. Anything that I wasn’t fully doing, I had to commit to from that point on. That moment was really powerful. The universe was saying to me, you need to do this now. I started to do in-home consultations, and I realized that the best way to spread this work was to turn it into a nonprofit.
Can you tell me more about Be Zero and the ambassador program?
Our mission at Be Zero is to inspire, educate and activate individuals to dramatically reduce their plastic and trash footprint, and to create simple and sustainable habits.
Our education programs engage individuals, families and communities to rethink their consumer and lifestyle habits and to activate their personal power to address growing environmental impacts, such as global trash, plastic pollution, climate change and overconsumption.
One things we do is called the Trash Diet Workshop, which is a four-hour workshop I host in my home with about five participants. We go over the history of waste — how we weren’t always wasteful. We take a tour of my home to see how I organize things, the products I use, the foods I eat. We make things like toothpaste, almond milk and cleaning supplies. It’s really fun and conversational. People get to see firsthand how we live without a trashcan and that we live in a relatively modern way. I’m not churning my own butter or weaving my own clothes. We’re just trying to show people that we you don’t necessarily need to be the capital letter Environmentalist.
We also have an Ambassador Volunteer Program, which is sort of community, mentorship and activism rolled together. I started this so I could begin to build networks around the U.S., and around the globe. Ambassadors apply online and through an orientation are trained in the Be Zero mission and philosophy. They help translate infographics and spread information in their communities. We have ambassadors in Bangalore, Beijing, Manchester, Trinidad and Tobago, New Zealand, Canada — really all over. Our goal for them is to be little lighthouses for this circular mindset. Because we’re a new nonprofit, we don’t have all the funding. I’m hoping to expand down the line to provide them with more funding to do better, more impactful work. Some ambassadors create social hours. We’re having them in five different cities right now here in the U.S. They’re just monthly get togethers for the community to share tips and advice, where they can introduce this stuff to people who don’t know anything about it. I also give talks and table around the community and at farmers markets…
This is an excerpt of an interview that is featured in the first issue of The Regeneration Magazine, coming next month.
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