Going Zero

Discover how to go zero waste with this personal story

When a beanbag sent thousands of polystyrene balls flying through her garden, Kate Hughes decided to make a decisive break with the throwaway society.

She and her husband transformed the lives of their family of four in England. They ditched plastic, shunned supermarkets, cooked all meals from scratch, bought only second-hand clothes, and made their own cleaning products. Then they went deeper – greening every aspect of their home life:

• energy
• transport
• money
• tech

The Hugheses have achieved the ‘zero waste’ goal of sending nothing to landfill. Now they are going even further…

Told with refreshing humility and humour, this eye-opening story shows that a well-lived life doesn’t have to be wrapped in plastic. Packed with handy tips, it reveals much about what makes a fulfilling modern family – and how readers can preserve the climate, forests and seas – while leading a more relaxing life.

Extract: Cooking our own meals

We were starting to realise that making the journey was leading to more questions than answers, more grey areas, misinformation and conflicts of interest than we ever imagined – and that was just about food. We hadn’t even got started on anything else that came into our home yet.

Take a single, uncontroversial ingredient, let’s say peppers. Should we buy them grown in a UK hothouse or ones trucked in from Spain? What if the Spanish ones are organic? Or the only UK option is wrapped in plastic? Which is better for the environment? Or at least less harmful? If we ever want to eat peppers again without negatively impacting the planet in some way are we going to have to grow our own? Because self-sufficiency wasn’t really part of the plan....

All we could do was dive in and hope we didn’t drown in the detail as we swam around looking for food that worked for us and the planet. We started with the problem of transport because food mileage was a well-established measure that meant we could actually make some decisions based on numbers for once. Or, at least, we thought we could.

Three-quarters of all the...

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