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Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste

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Description

Bea Johnson is “the mother of the zero waste lifestyle movement.” —CNN The book that started the waste-free living movement, Zero Waste Living—relates Bea Johnson’s inspirational personal story and provides practical tools and tips to help readers diminish their footprint and simplify their lives. In Zero Waste Home, Bea Johnson shares the story of how she simplified her life by reducing her waste. Today, Bea, her husband, Scott, and their two young sons produce just one quart of garbage a year, and their overall quality of life has changed for the better: they now have more time together, they’ve cut their annual spending by a remarkable forty percent, and they are healthier than they’ve ever been. This book shares essential how-to advice, secrets, and insights based on Bea’s experience. She demystifies the process of going Zero Waste with hundreds of easy tips for sustainable living that even the busiest people can integrate: from making your own mustard, to packing kids’ lunches without plastic, to canceling your junk mail, to enjoying the holidays without the guilt associated with overconsumption. Zero Waste Home is a stylish and relatable step-by-step guide that will give you the practical tools to help you improve your health, save money and time, and achieve a brighter future for your family—and the planet. Read more

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; 45550th edition (April 9, 2013)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1451697686


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 81


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.12 pounds


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.38 x 0.6 x 9.13 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #129,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #124 in Green Housecleaning #210 in Environmental Science (Books) #220 in Home Cleaning, Caretaking & Relocating


#124 in Green Housecleaning:


#210 in Environmental Science (Books):


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Finished this book in two days - very liberating read
The thing that drew me to this book was a feature in the April Martha Stewart. It was the pictures of Ms. Johnson's house that really struck me. It looks just like I want my house to look, clean and uncluttered. Ms. Johnson's motivation is imminently environmental, but mine is more just wanting a simpler, less wasteful, less self-indulgent life-style (so is hers, but she is largely motivated by the environment). I point out our different motivations because it does not matter what your motivations are to find this book helpful. This book is an extremely practical, easy-to-use guide to getting rid of the junk in your house and lifestyle. My bathroom is already transformed and I am so happy. I hung a sign on my door that I can see as I go out of the house that reads: "THINK before you bring anything into this house. Do you already have something you can use instead?" One can have the misapprehension that to live waste free is to become a hoarder - not so! It has a lot to do with not bringing unnecessary things into the house in the first place. I do not see myself going as far with it as Ms. Johnson - but what her book has done for me already was worth the read. You can use this book at your own discretion. As she says in the book, if you use it to dabble or to go whole hog with being waste free, you can still find help in this book. I only had a problem with some advice given on the first two pages of the "Kids" chapter, but I am not even going to tell you what the problem was because I would buy the book anyway and it is a world-view difference that doesn't have anything to do with the practicality and usefulness of the book. If everyone could live like this book advocates - what a clean, healthy place the world would be. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2013 by Corrina
    • Bea is the best!
This is a very inspiring book. When you hear "sustainability" you may picture a stereotypical hippie and be turned off. Bea is here to show you that sustainability and zero waste can be sexy and cool. She definitely takes it to an extreme that can be hard for most people to achieve. For me, I try to take what I can from this book and adapt it to my lifestyle. I try to always think of her advice when I shop and I'm finding that it's really helping me. I'm saving money, I'm recycling more, I'm saying no to unnecessary things and I'm cleaning out the clutter and donating unused things. It feels refreshing and clears your mind to focus on the good things in life. Having a toddler, I'm thrilled to pass on some of these ideologies to her as she grows up by watching me as an example. The book itself is well written, simple and beautiful. She really covers a lot and goes into detail with recipes. I love her personal story too. Knowing that she went from an extremely high-maintenance "Beverly Hill Housewife" type lady to one with strict zero waste discipline is incredible. She does it with so much grace and style. She shows that you can let go of so much and end up having so much more. I only wish I'd known of this long ago! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2014 by Ellen
    • Tips for building a healthier relationship with your stuff
Zero Waste Home is an extreme approach toward reducing your waste and simplifying your life. How extreme? Imagine a family of four generating only a quart of garbage — every year. Obviously, getting to this level of waste reduction takes us far beyond simple decluttering, and as the subtitle implies, the Zero Waste Home approach places its primary emphasis on the intake side of your stuff. Although Johnson notes early on that the book “will encourage you to declutter,” her eyes are clearly on bigger prizes: “a better environment” and “a better you” [Kindle location 170]. The path for doing this is by “understanding the effect of our purchasing power on the environment and acting accordingly” [192]. In this context, decluttering is about not just getting rid of stuff, but learning how to refrain from collecting stuff in the first place. While Zero Waste Home does not have a method for decluttering, Johnson did have a motto which she and her family applied when they downsized to a much smaller house: “What we did not truly use, need, and love had to go” [85]. Using this motto, the author’s family reportedly got rid of 80 percent of their belongings within two years. Zero Waste Home certainly delivers on its promise to “take you beyond the typical eco-friendly alternatives covered well in other publications” [179]. For starters, the book takes the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra one step further at each end, by adding refusing (what we do not need) as the best option and rotting (composting) as the option of final resort. But getting to Zero Waste in today’s society is another matter altogether; indeed, Johnson describes Zero Waste as “an idealistic goal, a carrot to get as close as possible” [188] and notes that “this is not a book about achieving absolute Zero Waste,” [187] which is not possible because of current manufacturing practices in place. The author should know: as first she tried to do things that even she found to be too extreme — churning her own butter, making her own lip balm, even foraging for moss to use instead of toilet paper [152], before she backed off in order to find some balance. Even so, her family’s resulting “balance” is quite extreme for most people: using kitchen towels for sandwich bags instead of plastic ones [711], using cloth bags to buy all your produce and bulk items [862-66], or taking your bread home from a bakery in a pillowcase [873], to name just a few. Fortunately, you don’t have to go to such extremes to derive value from the book. In fact, this book generated the largest number of useful tips (almost 20 of them, to be exact) of any of the books I read on decluttering. Perhaps this is because at this point I am as interested in reducing my intake of stuff as I am of getting rid of it. Although the book is chock full of tips for reducing clutter (the word (de)clutter and its variants appear over 60 times in the book’s narrative), a lot of the book’s tips are about avoiding the creation of additional clutter by refusing to accept stuff, for instance by thinking twice before letting anything new into your house [306] or considering the life cycle and choosing only products you can reuse or recycle [316]. Again, most people would find such tips to be onerous as a unremitting regime, but they can also be handy tools to have in one’s decluttering toolbox. Happily, Zero Waste Home also includes useful sections to help with systematically reducing the clutter in various areas of your house and life, for instance getting rid of kitchen gadgets and specialty items that are not worth the space [612-636], having a carefully selected small “capsule wardrobe” [1840] which emphasizes style and quality over fashion and quantity, and tackling the formidable nests that are bathroom cabinets [1288]. Perhaps Zero Waste Home’s most useful contribution to the decluttering process is a series of questions to ask during the downsizing process [e.g., 641]: – Is it in working condition? Is it outdated or expired? – Do I use it regularly? – Is it a duplicate? – Does it put my family’s health in danger? – Do I keep it out of guilt? – Do I keep it because society tells me that I need one (“everyone has one”)? – Does it truly save time, as promised? – Could something else achieve the same task? – Is it worth my precious time dusting and cleaning? – Could I use this space for something else? – Is it reusable? I like that this list of questions is a menu rather than a checklist; the questions are varied enough so that I can pick and choose which ones are appropriate to ask for a given item rather than feeling like I’m supposed to ask each question of every item (which is a non-starter for me). This makes the list another set of handy tools to use in the decluttering process, particularly for dealing with difficult or sticky decisions about individual objects. These takeaways are important because at times, the book’s single-minded focus on getting as close to Zero Waste as possible seems more fanatic than sensible. Even though Johnson says early in the book that “how much waste one generates is not important” and that “everyone can adopt the changes that are possible in their life” [191], Zero Waste Home also spends a fair amount of time prescribing correct behavior. For instance, “shopping should always start” with buying used items, preferably at thrift stores, garage sales, or online sites such as Amazon and Craiglist [380]. Such prescriptions at times lead to rather unhelpful assertions; for example, saying that “stuff takes us away from our roots, from the outdoors” [552] is only part of the story, and disposables [711] are not pure evil but in fact can save time and offer convenience, which is a different kind of freedom from making our own stuff. Zero Waste Home‘s emphasis on avoiding packaging at all costs sometimes leads to rather absurd concessions, as when Johnson advises readers to refill a beer jug at a local brewery but notes that this method requires being ready to drink a gallon of beer at once before the beer loses its carbonation; her solution to “have some friends over” [925] is a pretty weak and unreliable one. In the end, Zero Waste Home amply demonstrates its premise (whether intentionally or not) that Zero Waste is an “idealistic goal” which requires going to extremes that most people won’t accept, including me. Even so, you can find value in this book without having to embrace its extremes, especially its many useful resources on decluttering both as a process of getting rid of things and as a process of refusing to take them in. Even adopting just a few of the book’s suggestions will help you move the needle toward building a healthier relationship with your stuff. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2015 by Ideaphoriana

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