Reducing Waste home
Wecome on our waste reduction resource page. SZW's mission is to help individuals who want to make a difference by reducing the waste they are producing. To do so, we have gathered videos, maps, books, website... so everyone can explore the zero waste movement at its own pace. Feel free to contact us if you have questions or join our facebook group to share this unique passion with us.
What the Zero waste Movement?
The role of Bea Johnson
Bea Johnson is kind of the Mother of the Zero waste movement. In this video, she presents the zero waste key ideas.
Although trying to reach the absolute "Zero" waste lifestyle is an honorable goal in life, our work at SZW is more alligned with Marie Bonneau's (the Zero waste Chef) quote: "We don't need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly".
Where to Start ? The 5 R's of Zero Waste lifestyle
In those 4 and 6 minutes videos, you will get the basics of the zero waste lifestyle and its fulfilling way of thinking.
The Zero Waste Survival Kit
SZW has developped a swapping library so you can identify easy next steps to change your home.
The Best tool to recycle properly in Toronto: The City Waste Wizard!
Check out the app the city has developed to find out what item goes in the blue, the black and the green bin (or what you need to bring to one of the 7 City Transfert Stations). In this way you avoid doing what's Wishcycling which mean that you base your choice on assumption.
Low Waste stores in Scarborough: A map
SZW is working on a map of Scarborough where low waste stores are localized.
The Scarborough Environmental Association's : Ethnic Groceries map
SEA has developed a map to locate local businesses. Generaly, local stores are more opened to their clients needs and wants. This map is a great tool to find a place to use your reusable bags.
The Scarborough Environmental Association's : Thrift store map
SEA has developed a map to locate place you can buy second hand clothing.
Documentaries about waste (yes, one can be passionate about this ;-))
The Water Brothers
Many Canadians have become aware of the plastic crisis affecting the world's oceans, but this same crisis is also unfolding right in our own backyards. In Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, researchers have found more than six million plastic particles floating in a single square km of lake surface, higher concentrations than can be found in the heart of the ,Great Pacific Garbage Patch,.
Unlike the ocean, where plastic is dispersed across over 70 percent of the Earths surface, in the Great Lakes it becomes concentrated at a much faster rate and it is already showing up in our drinking water, locally brewed beer and the stomachs of wildlife.
In Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, the Brothers will talk to local residents on this health issue and also join researchers from several different Ontario universities as they monitor the accumulation of plastic in water and wildlife. In the midst of vibrant cormorant colonies, audiences will join scientists who are collecting bird chicks that have passed away and checking for any plastic debris in their stomachs. In their most recent study, 26 of the 30 chicks they collected had plastic fragments in their gastrointestinal tracts. But cormorants only eat fish. So the only way the chicks could contain plastic is if the fish their mothers passed on to them, also contained plastic. Even for birds that don't eat plastic directly, it's still working its way up the food chain.
Not all the news regarding plastics is bad. The federal government has taken action to ban microbeads from consumer products and by 2021 a ban on a wide range of single-use plastic products. The Brothers will conclude the episode with a series of useful lifestyle tips on how audiences can reduce or eliminate many types of single-use plastic from their daily lives, including from some unexpected sources like the plastic microfibres in clothing.
From Youtube video's description
Books to read
Garbology
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of America’s biggest export, our most prodigious product, and our greatest legacy: our trash
The average American produces 102 tons of garbage across a lifetime and $50 billion in squandered riches are rolled to the curb each year. But our bins are just the starting point for a strange, impressive, mysterious, and costly journey that may also represent the greatest untapped opportunity of the century.
In Garbology, Edward Humes investigates trash—what’s in it; how much we pay for it; how we manage to create so much of it; and how some families, communities, and even nations are finding a way back from waste to discover a new kind of prosperity. Along the way, he introduces a collection of garbage denizens unlike anyone you’ve ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT, the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angeles’ Garbage Mountain landfill, the artists residing in San Francisco’s dump, and the family whose annual trash output fills not a dumpster or a trash can, but a single mason jar. Garbology reveals not just what we throw away, but who we are and where our society is headed. Waste is the one environmental and economic harm that ordinary working Americans have the power to change—and prosper in the process.
Garbology is raising awareness of trash consumption and is sparking community-wide action through One City One Book programs around the country. It is becoming an increasingly popular addition to high school and college syllabi and is being adopted by many colleges and universities for First Year Experience programs.
Text taken from Amazon
This book is available at the Toronto Public Library.
Rubbish!
It is from the discards of former civilizations that archaeologists have reconstructed most of what we know about the past, and it is through their examination of today’s garbage that William Rathje and Cullen Murphy inform us of our present. Rubbish! is their witty and erudite investigation into all aspects of the phenomenon of garbage. Rathje and Murphy show what the study of garbage tells us about a population’s demographics and buying habits. Along the way, they dispel the common myths about our “garbage crisis”—about fast-food packaging and disposable diapers, about biodegradable garbage and the acceleration of the average family’s garbage output. They also suggest methods for dealing with the garbage that we do have.
Text taken from the University of Arizona Press Website
