No Trash in Here
Have you ever thought about the amount of waste that you produce on a daily
basis? Do you know how bad that is for our planet? Lauren Singer sure does.
Lauren Singer is a 23 year-old former NYU
student and an Environmentalist. This young
woman has something particular about her.
“Why?” are you guys probably thinking, well,
this young lady hasn’t produced any trash in
the last two years.
It all started when she was in college. There she had a teacher, Jeffrey Hollender,
an activist and a distributor of natural products, who had a view on things and used
to pass on his knowledge into his students and right there, in 2012, Lauren started to
think of how much trash she was producing and when she found out, she was
shocked “It was not possible for me, alone, to produce that much waste”, she told to
BBC, which told the world about her story.
In an early phase of the project Lauren started off by replacing plastic recipients
by glass ones. She doesn’t buy new clothes, everything she has, has been previously
worn by other people and instead of using public transportation, she walks
everywhere. Public transportation is only used when she needs to go far away.
She even recycles that trash you can’t avoid to produce. “I take organic trash,
including toilet paper, once a week to a place where it gets transformed into compost
and my clothes, when they’re really old, go to a place where they get recycled.”, she
explained.
To help other people become more ecological and to share her day-to-day
challenges, she created a blog entitled “Trash Is for
Tossers”. She has confessed that some of her biggest
challenges were finding those things that are really
necessary like toothpaste, laundry detergent and things
like that. Fortunately Lauren learned how to make those
things herself. To make laundry detergent you need
“three ingredients: sodium bicarbonate, sodium
hydroxide or carbonate and soap (which is also made at
home)”, explained Lauren. Besides all of these amazing things Lauren does, she also
has a company that sells environmentally-friendly products, The Simply Co.
10