Whatever happened to the zero waste movement?
Plastic straw bans sparked a movement in the 2010s. Have our sentiments around plastic and zero waste changed since then?
It was a pleasant summer day along the waters off the coast of Guanacaste, Costa Rica when marine biologist Christine Figgener captured the heartrending video that sparked the movement to ban plastic straws.
While collecting data on olive ridley sea turtles, she and her colleagues would routinely lift the creatures up onto their boat for examination. Upon inspection of a sea turtle on August 10, 2015, they found that it had something peculiar lodged in its nose. At first, Figgener and the other scientists onboard speculated that the object could be a barnacle or a tube worm. But as the full length of the item emerged, the turtle wiggling with discomfort, they quickly realized it wasn’t something organic—it was a plastic straw.
“It was mind boggling,” Figgener recalls. And while the straw so deeply lodged into the creature’s nostril was distressing, she notes that plastics permeating their way into marine life was nothing new. “As researchers, we have always known that plastic is a problem.”
Plastic production underwent an explosive increase from two million tons produced in 1950 to over 290 million tons in 2023, and by the late 1950s, there were already numerous scientific records of marine turtles ingesting plastic bags. But it wasn’t until Figgener’s video, and other viral images of marine life entangled in plastic proliferated across the internet that plastic use, and straws in particular, caused a public outcry.
Throughout the 2010s, anti-straw and zero waste trends took the internet by storm, and the infamous “trash jar” was born. Going plastic free was simultaneously a trendy aesthetic, a marketing tagline for businesses, and a political movement—more than twenty cities around the country placed strict regulations around plastic straws.
But did this movement make a difference for the environment, or merely distract us?
Was the movement flawed from the beginning?
In 2015, Kathryn Kellogg, author of 101 Ways To Go Zero Waste, began her zero waste journey to save some money and live a healthier lifestyle. The idea of keeping a trash jar compelled her as a fun challenge. To hold herself accountable, she began sharing her journey online.
But throughout her two years of keeping a trash jar, Kellogg and the zero waste community started noticing stark flaws within the movement. A perfectly zero waste lifestyle began to feel time consuming and impractical. Many felt dispirited for not being able to meet the standards of living a “zero waste” lifestyle and noted that all this individual effort did little to stop the flood of new single-use plastics entering the waste stream every day.
(A brief history of how plastic straws took over the world.)
“Living in San Francisco, so much was available package-free, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to many other areas across the country,” says Kellogg. “And it’s impossible to be completely zero waste, because we don’t live in a society that is built that way.”
The movement also relied heavily on consumerism. For every jar that one could put their trash in, there was an aesthetically pleasing jar to purchase from a “Zero Waste” brand. For every step individuals could take toward zero waste, there was an item that “needed” to be bought in order to get them there. Rather than calling attention to working with what we already have, and simply buying less, it was still grounded in producing and shipping more “things.”
Figgener fears the public also became too focused on villainizing straws, rather than looking at plastic production itself as the problem.
While plastic straws themselves are certainly a detriment to many species, they make up only 0.025 percent of the staggering eight million tons of plastic that flow into the ocean each year—which equates to about two garbage trucks’ worth of plastic entering the ocean every minute.
“Straws are such a small percentage of all of the single-use plastic that we’re using,” she says. “For companies, banning them became something they could do to appease the masses. They got rid of straws but didn’t tackle the rest of the supply chain plastic that we’re creating.”
How the pandemic changed the narrative
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the sentiment around the zero waste movement started evolving.
“The movement had become so focused on individual responsibility, which is absolutely very important, but the conversation shifted more towards: how can business be supporting us better, how can policy be supporting us better?” says Kellogg.
(Microplastics are in our bodies. How much do they harm us?)
Around this time, environmental author and educator Leah Thomas started highlighting ways the zero waste movement had excluded entire communities.
“A lot of lower income people and people of color were kind of blamed or shamed for not being able to participate in the movement, because it was viewed as something expensive,” says Thomas.
Thomas noted that without an inclusive approach, bans could inadvertently harm those who are already among the most vulnerable in society, such as individuals who require plastic straws to eat and drink. Covid lockdowns were a stark reminder of this, she says, showing that in hospitals, for instance, specific single-use items may be essential.
“Sometimes, it’s taken out of the equation that people are existing in systems that are imperfect, and should have a bit of grace,” continues Thomas.
Reducing plastic from the top down
As the zero waste movement lost much of its luster, more organizations started pushing for policies that make it easier for individuals to reduce their plastic usage.
Beyond Plastics, a nationwide project that launched in 2019, is one nonprofit pushing for national policies to curb plastic pollution. The organization has over 100 chapters across the country that also push for local and state-level policy change.
Notably, their advocacy does not push for recycling.
Only 5-6 percent for post-consumer plastic waste in the US is actually recyclable, and the per capita generation of plastic waste has increased by 263 percent since 1980. Thomas notes that plastic usage in the U.S., even when recycled, has also harmed other countries. Millions of tons of plastic waste, often collected from recycling plants, are shipped to low income countries that don’t have the infrastructure to prevent pollution caused by plastic entering waterways or being incinerated.
“The biggest thing to keep in mind is that the plastic pollution problem is not going to go away without reduction—we’re going to have to reduce the production and use of unnecessary single-use plastic.” says Melissa Valliant, communications director at Beyond Plastics. Instead, the organization wants citizens to advocate and vote for policies that curb plastic production.
(This is why your recycling doesn't always get recycled.)
In February, Oceana released polling results that showed 83 percent of American voters are concerned about single-use plastic products, and 84 percent of American voters support requiring companies to reduce single-use plastic packaging.
But within the G20 countries, the U.S. is only one of four that has yet to impose a nationwide ban on single-use plastics. A recent report noted that a 75 percent cut in plastics is needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C, and that the U.S. generates significantly more plastic waste than any other country, producing roughly 287 pounds of plastic per person, per year.
While the U.S. has not placed a single-use plastic ban at the federal level, the responsibility has been taken up by some cities and states that have pushed their own policies attempting to limit plastic pollution. California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Vermont have all placed bans on plastic bags. Since California implemented the ban in 2014, the state saw a 70 percent reduction in plastic bag usage.
Albeit flawed, environmentalists say the zero waste movement helped make the environmental threat of plastic a mainstream issue.
“In a lot of ways, straw bans were good stepping stones, and now people are able to dig deeper and know that the problem is much larger,” says Christine Figgener. “It’s not just about saving sea turtles, it’s about saving the basis of life for our own species. We need clean air and clean water within our own habitat and ecosystem. If we don’t understand that, nothing will change.”
