About Me

For the longest time I considered myself a mini-hoarder. I took every “free” thing ever handed to me. When my possessions broke, I’d keep them around with the intention of getting them fixed. I had shelves full of books and knick knacks that I’d planned to sell on eBay. My kitchen drawers were full of take-out napkins, sauce packets, and plasticware. Sure I was never going to use any of those mayo packets (because mayo is the worst thing ever), but maybe someday a guest would want to make their food taste worse, and I’d be ready for them. It was a cluttered way of living, to say the least.

Then in the Spring of 2019, while on a work retreat, a coworker’s spouse give a 5 minute presentation on living a zero-waste life, and something came alive inside me. Or rather, it was like something that had always been alive inside me heard its name spoken for the first time. I wasn’t a hoarder. I was zero waste.

The first step on my zero waste journey was purchasing a Kindle copy of Bea Johnson’s book Zero Waste Home. (This happened about an hour after the presentation.) In it she describes how reducing your waste is not only good for the planet but simplifies your life. As I read it, I found myself paying more attention to things I threw in the trash. I started asking if there were better alternatives. Often there was.

I found ways to repurpose old, tattered clothes and shoes, to recycle old electronics, to donate books to those who needed them, and to turn my food waste into fertilizer. Once I realized that the more things I brought into my home, the more work I needed to do to dispose of them responsibly, my consumption started to decrease. And throughout all of this, my life did get simpler. And though the book didn’t promise it, another side effect was that my life’s direction got more defined. It stopped being enough to just make these efforts on my own; I needed to share the tips and advice I was learning.

It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed and hopeless on this journey. Yeah, I can compost my broccoli stems, but that one act feels tiny when I look at the bigger picture. Pointless even. This is why that quote from Dr. Estés at the top of this page means so much to me. It is a reminder that every small act of goodness matters, and that it’s the accumulation of acts that lead to change. Someone had the idea to give an informal presentation on zero waste, and now that’s how I live. Just a couple months before that I had watched a documentary called Eating Animals. A group of people had the idea to create it, and I became a vegetarian because of it. Greta Thunberg started skipping school one day a week to protest climate change, and she spurred millions into action. Individuals choosing to act can set off a chain reactions.

To state it clearly, my goal with this blog is to share all the ways we can live more sustainably. I believe people want to care for our planet, but as a species we’ve made it incredibly difficult. I just want to help make it easier. As individuals, we can’t fix everything, but our reach is so much larger than we imagine. And every small, calm thing we do brings us closer to reaching an enduring good.

Nic Small