The Zero Shop aims to serve as a resource for the building of more ethical and sustainable habits in our everyday lives. We strive to create a positive impact on our community and beyond for the health and future of our planet.
The Zero Shop provides products to support a low waste lifestyle from companies that we feel are doing more to change the world. We give consideration to the entire life cycle of each product we provide.
Many years ago we were inspired by the story of Bea Johnson and her family of four’s mason jar of trash created over the course of a year. We began evaluating the way we were living and after a few months of slowly making changes to decrease our waste, we tried a waste challenge to see how little trash we could create over a 2 week period. We collected all of the trash our family of 4 produced in a jar we kept out on our counter. This really helped us to visualize the waste we were creating and helped us to problem-solve ways we could avoid creating that same waste in the future. We did these challenges a couple of times and began setting up our lives in a way that supported this lifestyle, from simple things like bringing our own reusable coffee cups to the coffee shop, always keeping totes on hand, and shopping in bulk. We eventually reached a place where we were able to pull off a very small amount of waste every week, but to be honest, it was really, really hard to get started.
Then we took a year to travel around the world with our two children. We were blown away by the amount of plastic pollution we saw almost everywhere we went. Have you seen the Matrix? You know how they are all living in this weird alternate reality world they can’t see and then something happens and they can suddenly ‘see’ the matrix? That’s how plastic waste has been for us. We started to see it’s impact and now we can’t unsee it. Every day and every act carries the weight of plastic sitting in a landfill for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, or seeing it floating in our beautiful oceans in an enormous gyre we can’t even begin to fathom.
Doing what we could to decrease our waste took on a new meaning. We returned home with a renewed mission to try to fight this tide of single use plastic and waste that is washing over our society and our world. We think that it shouldn’t be as hard to set up your life to decrease your waste as it was for us, so we have created The Zero Shop to make it easier! We want to provide as many resources as we can to help and inspire you to make whatever changes you can.
We know that there are many simple day-to-day choices you can make in the products you choose and that the impact of those choices can create a much wider-reaching effect. We also know that it is incredibly important to consider what will happen to that very same product at the end of its usefulness. For this reason, we have chosen our products very selectively from companies that we feel are practicing ethically, sustainably and whom we believe are acting as a force for good. We have also considered the lifespan of each product we offer and ways to keep each one of them out of the landfill (or our oceans!) at the end of their lifespan.
We know that no one can be truly ‘Zero Waste’, but that the concept serves as an ideal we can all work towards. We believe that we all benefit when we try to do our part and that even small changes can make a big impact.