Waste Reduction Week in Canada started in the province of Ontario in 2001, but now occurs across the country. It emphasizes actionable means of reducing waste at the consumer-level, promoting habits such as bulk purchasing foods and appropriate waste sorting.
The zero waste community consists of individuals that have shifted their lifestyles to be nearly devoid of waste production. While the average Canadian produces 2.7 kg of waste per day, individuals in the zero waste movement have been known to fit all their annual waste into mason jars or shoe boxes – oftentimes even less. The waste they do produce are often along the lines of fruit stickers, clothing tags, silicon packets, credit cards, or bar-drink straws. Otherwise, all their material consumption is either recyclable or compostable in their region. This is of course assisted by the slew of new products that are now regularly entering the market, including toothpaste tablets in recyclable containers, bamboo toothbrushes, even compostable mascara. While some of these products are widely available in grocery and drug stores, most of them are restricted in range to specialty retailers. Locally-managed zero waste bulk stores are growing in popularity, notable ones found in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Waterloo, Halifax, and several throughout Montreal. If you’re familiar with Canadian geography, you would know that nearly all these cities are among the largest metropolitan areas in the country.
I’ve partaken in Waste Reduction Week for years, in which I attempt to fit a week’s worth of waste into a mason jar. I’ve done it successfully in the past by purchasing at farmer’s markets and filling up on basics at bulk stores, but always in a large city where these commodities are readily available. This year’s Waste Reduction Week, I find myself on the island archipelago of Haida Gwaii, located 80km from the mainland of British Columbia, Canada (or otherwise, a 7-hour ferry ride). The population of the entire archipelago is less than 5000, with just a handful of small but vibrant communities erected where the winds and waves are not too harsh for settlement. My current home is in the village of Queen Charlotte (Daajing Giids Llnagaay in the Haida dialect), which does not contain a tare-and-weigh bulk store. The farmer’s market is small but robust, though many of the locally-produced goods there are also wrapped in non-recyclable plastic. Here, the challenge had taken on a new and reinvigorated form with a slew of obstacles I lacked in the past.
The closest semblance to bulk purchasing on the island is a local health food store, which bulk purchases both essentials (rice, spices) and commodities (organic stoneground kamut flour, Canadian organic red hard spring wheat berries) but repackages the items in store-labelled clear plastic bags. When the store owner told me that store space was a main factor in limiting bulk options, I did not doubt him. The store is filled to the absolute brim, still offering sustainable alternatives to everyday products like bamboo-based toilet paper and toothbrushes.
I was not able to sustain waste-free meals for the week. I had some remnants of bulk-purchased lentils and vegetable stock I had bought in Toronto before my move to Haida Gwaii, but was not able to find any other waste-free grains or legumes. Fruits and vegetables were less of a problem, especially with leniency to reusable produce bags at the grocery store. However, bread, rice, beans – all inaccessible.
A caveat to the “zero-waste” lifestyle is that you can still recycle and compost. There is no compost collection or processing facility on Haida Gwaii. I’m lucky to stay in a home that has a composter in the backyard, so my food waste for the week was accounted for. However, a few weeks into my move to Haida Gwaii, I was informed that tin and glass were no longer accepted for recycling on the island. All glass bottles and tins of chickpeas now went straight to the trash, eliminating aisles and aisles of recyclable alternatives to plastic-wrapped dry beans and lentils. Any recycling on the island has to be dropped off to the depot and sorted by the consumer – this assists in maintaining waste literacy and responsibility amongst the residents, but also poses a challenge to accessibility; does everyone have the capacity to access this depot, whether with a car or simply making the time? Infrastructural barriers to zero-waste can be disproportionately prominent across some communities – a consideration that must be stated during the promotion of zero-waste living.
In many structural ways, zero-waste lifestyles are easier in large metropolitan areas. That said, the islands of Haida Gwaii provide a unique opportunity to engage in waste-free consumption that cannot be replicated in many cities. The remoteness of the islands, the deeply-preserved Indigenous history, and abundance of many resources here have created a culture of self-sufficiency unlike any city-dwelling community I’ve encountered. Many households here will catch and consume their own meat or fish, preserve produce in jars, and make jams and relishes to last for years. It’s not uncommon to have locals drop off buckets of fresh-caught crab or salmon captured nearby. Lots of these catches are frozen or canned in mason jars to last over the winter until the season begins again. Mushroom foraging, berry-picking, sea asparagus harvest, and kelp collecting are popular activities on the island. Here, I’ve learned to can the salmon that run through our backyard streams, find and dehydrate the best mushrooms, clean crabs – all things I’ve never had the opportunity to do in Toronto. All these acts demand a sense of nature and food literacy that is often missing from our cities. Urban agriculture provides an opportunity to re-engage nature-depleted city-dwellers to sustainable food consumption, whether it be through community gardens or replacing your lawn with garden beds. The idea of cultivating a society rich in sustainable skills is crucial to empowering citizens in the zero-waste movement – this includes growing local produce, learning to sew your ripped clothing, fixing your faulty toaster, or finding and preserving your own food.
Trying this challenge on Haida Gwaii has given me insight to how one common necessity to all these acts of self-sufficiency is time. Foraging, fishing, cleaning, preserving – they take time, and lots of it. Can we expect all members of our communities to have or make the time to engage in the zero-waste movement, especially those that lack the infrastructure to process waste or the financial means to invest in a waste-free lifestyle? What about those among us that come from Sri Lanka, or Japan, or Brazil, where our cultural staples are imported in plastic? The obstacles and sacrifices involved in adopting a waste-free lifestyle is inherently deeply imbalanced. While the zero-waste movement is a powerful means of radical resistance to waste production, considerations must be made while pondering the plausibility of wide-spread adoption. The opportunity cost of self-sufficiency and zero-waste is unequal across our societies, and this must be included in our expectations of waste-free transitions.
Article by Hashveenah Manoharan