How I found my way to a zero waste lifestyle?

Eventually I understood that the problem isn't where we put our garbage. It is also about how much of it do we make and what material it is made out of. When a glass bottle ends up in nature it does not get picked up by the wind or consumed by an animal. But when a plastic bottle starts degrading due to sun and other nature conditions it turns into small pieces that get carried away into our ocean and later end up in the fish we eat or just get eaten by animals.

At that point I decided to look into this problem. I went through a lot of videos and picture of polluted nature covered in trash. Then I went down the loophole of YouTube and saw lots of videos of people who live a zero waste lifestyle. Meaning they avoid plastic packaging and products made out of plastic. They also try to buy less of new products and they rather reuse older ones. This type of lifestyle started to interest me. I would watch hours and hours worth of videos of people who only drink tap water, carry around their own to-go coffee cup, drink out of stainless steel straws and instead of using plastic utensils they used their own bamboo ones.

I watched those videos and was deeply interested yet I still was using plastic utensils, took to-go cocoas in single-use coffee cups and used a plastic straw. Then I decided to stop my behavior. I stopped using plastic straws, I started carrying around my glass water bottle, started drinking cocoas in cafes(I didn't carry around a reusable to-go cup) and started carrying around a little fork and spoon with me. A bit later I also purchased a menstrual cup so that I would not have to spend my money on pad and tampons and to produce less plastic and to be healthier and not in contact with chemicals.

Because my interest in this topic kept on progressing and the changes I made started catching the eye of others, I decided to start a anti-single-use- plastic instagram called laurahatesplastic where I shared information about polluted nature and about the zero waste changes in my life. At the moment I keep posting and finding new ways to produce less plastic trash.

#zerowaste #environment