bea johnson
Tell us your story from the beginning. Who were you before you went zero waste?
I came to the US as an au pair; I’m originally from France. I wanted to experience the American way of life I’d seen on TV: the big house, big car, big refrigerator and all the stuff that comes with all this. After seven years, though, we missed the life we’d known in the cities we’d previously lived in.
In London, Amsterdam and Paris we were used to walking and biking everywhere. But our house in the US was in a place where we had to get into a car to go to grocery stores, schools and restaurants. We decided to move to be closer to amenities.
Before finding the right house, we rented an apartment for one year. We only moved in with the necessities. What we found out during that year is that when you live with less, all of a sudden you have more time to do what’s important to you—more time for friends, family, and picnics and hikes.
When we did find the right house, we got everything out of storage and realised we hadn’t missed 80 per cent of our belongings for a whole year. So we let go of them. It’s thanks to the simplicity that we also found time to read books and watch documentaries on environmental issues. That’s when my husband and I started feeling really bad about the future that we, as parents, were creating for our children—the future that we were going to leave behind. That’s what gave us the motivation to change.
We watched our energy and water consumption, and then I turned towards our rubbish. In trying to find solutions to reduce it, I found the term ‘zero waste’—which, back then, was only used to describe manufacturing practices or waste management at a city level. It was not a term to describe something you do at home.
Finding that term lit a light bulb in my head. It gave me a goal. But there were no books, no blogs, no guide on how to live a zero-waste lifestyle. I had to test a lot of things. I had to test a lot of extremes. Eventually, we found a solution we could see ourselves doing for life, and that’s when zero waste became a lifestyle.
How did you go from living in excess to zero waste? What were the challenges?
To me, when I started letting go, I felt such an amazing feeling of freedom that it almost
