Kathryn Kellogg is the founder of GoingZeroWaste.com, a lifestyle website dedicated to helping people live a healthier and more sustainable life. She is the author of 101 Ways To Go Zero Waste, Zero Waste Kids and 101 Tips for a Zero-Waste Kitchen.

With an active and engaged following on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, Kellogg has also been featured on legacy media outlets, including CNN, NBC Nightly News, Women’s Health, The Oprah Magazine, Good Morning America, NPR and The Guardian. She has led sustainability workshops at numerous business organization such as Google, Salesforce, Slack, Amazon and Skillshare.

 

What inspired you to start your zero-waste journey?

I fell into zero-waste living a little backwards. I first started reducing my waste when I was a full-time working actor. It was more for financial reasons than environmental ones in the beginning. And then when I learned about the zero-waste movement, I realized that I had already been practicing many of the principles. I started my advocacy online and in my books because I wanted to use my storytelling skills to inspire people to make easy swaps that are better for the wallet and the planet.

 

What is considered a zero-waste life?

There’s no one definition. I think anyone who’s interested in reducing waste can consider themselves to be participating in a zero-waste lifestyle. The name definitely does it a disservice. So many people think they have to get to zero or to produce no trash at all, but it’s really about reducing the amount of trash you send to the landfill—first, by buying only what you need; then, by recycling and composting; and last, by throwing away whatever you have left over.

 

What are the personal benefits of this lifestyle?

It’s so peaceful not having to deal with as much trash. I’ve been able to build really good systems, so everything has a place in my home. When you step outside of that consumer mindset, you’re able to focus on the things that are truly important, like your hobbies and the people you love.

 

What are your top tips for improving a household’s sustainability?

One of the best things that you can do is to stop buying as much. In the U.S., we tend to overconsume to the extreme. Check the secondhand markets first before buying anything new. Try to be a bit more mindful about food packaging—avoiding plastic and Styrofoam whenever possible. Swap out your paper towels for reusable rags. If you have a zero-waste or bulk-refill store nearby, go check it out.

And then, of course, there’s composting. On average, 50 percent of household waste is organic matter that could otherwise be composted. Most people think that food scraps will break down in a landfill, but they won’t because landfills are designed for storage, not decomposition.

 

What is the environmental impact of food waste?

If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions behind the United States and China. So, reducing our food waste is one of the best impacts we can have. On average, 16 percent of all methane emissions in the U.S. come from organic matter trapped in landfills that is unable to break down. And methane burns a lot hotter in the atmosphere, making it, on average, about 32 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

 

How do you reduce your family’s food waste?

Reducing food waste is a no-brainer when it comes to protecting the planet, and shrinking food waste at home is great for you personally because it’s going to save you money. A lot of us completely overbuy food, so one of the best things you can do is to simply buy less and then have a little bit of a plan.

I hate meal planning, but before you go to the store, take a quick inventory of what you already have, and then create an area in your fridge for food that needs to be eaten first. Prioritize eating the older food before you move on to eating the newer items.

I always recommend that people buy one less meal than they think they’re going to need for the week because oftentimes something comes up—I might not be hungry one day; I might wind up having lunch out with someone; lunch might be randomly provided at work for my husband; or maybe the leftovers are a little bit larger than I thought they were going to be. By planning for one fewer meal, I ensure that I’m not buying too much food.

 

How do you balance the pressure of perfection against practicality?

I don’t really think there is pressure for perfection these days; at least I’m not feeling it. It’s all about making better choices, slowly phasing out wasteful products you already own and keeping perfectly good items and using them up before switching to less wasteful alternatives.

Start with the big four: ditch plastic water bottles for a reusable one; drink your coffee in a real mug at the shop or bring an insulated thermos to get it on the go; say no straw with your drink order; and bring reusable bags to the grocery store. Throw some reusable produce bags in there, too.

 

What are your favorite reusable products or tools?

I have so many! I have to give a shout-out to my Kayaness reusable period underwear. You could not pay me to go back to using disposable pads. I also love my bidet attachment and my stainless steel safety razor, which have saved me so much money.

 

How has your zero-waste worldview evolved?

The zero-waste movement got really bogged down and super-specific five or six years ago, but now a lot of us are focused on the bigger picture. We can’t expect everyone to live a perfect zero-waste lifestyle in a world that isn’t set up for us to do so.

We live in a linear economy in which we take resources from the planet, turn them into products and then, at the end of their life, throw them into a giant hole in the ground. It’s not a very smart system, especially when everything else in nature lives without creating trash. So, what if we could move toward a circular economy where all of the resources could be reused over and over again? Take, for example, a cotton T-shirt that could be given back to the manufacturer after we’ve used it, where they would compost it and use it to grow more cotton.

This very effective form of recycling would have to start with better designs, so that products would be engineered from the outset to be easily separated, recycled and transformed into new, high-quality materials.

Aluminum and steel recycling are both highly effective. An aluminum can, for example, can go from your curbside bin back to store shelves in 90 days. It is an incredibly tight, closed-loop process. How can we reimagine more of the things we buy like this? We need companies thinking through the whole lifecycle of their products so that all materials can be reclaimed. We also need more modularity and repairability for our belongings. The right to repair laws are doing great work on this. 

We can’t extract unlimited resources from a planet that has finite resources to offer. Every year, we hit something called Earth Overshoot Day, where we’ve consumed all the resources that the Earth can sustainably produce for the year. Last year we hit it on July 24, and if every single person lived like we do in the U.S., we would have hit it on March 14. We’re living in a completely unsustainable way, and the solutions are right here. We just have to consume smarter and better.

 

What other environmental causes do you champion?

Beyond focusing on our own, very small amount of trash, we’re turning our focus and efforts to ensuring a more sustainable world for everyone. I highly recommend that people get plugged into a local group or organization that’s fighting waste or another environmental issue that they might be passionate about, like conservation with the Sierra Club or clean water with The Surfrider Foundation.

 

How do you stay motivated and avoid burnout in your environmental advocacy work?

I think it’s really important to allow myself to be a multifaceted human being. For about seven years, I read books only about environmentalism, and I was feeling really burned out. So I picked up a book just for fun, and it reminded me that I can be more than one thing, and I can enjoy more than one thing. It’s important to balance our interests.

 

Sandra Yeyati is national editor of Natural Awakenings.

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