Racing to Zero: In Pursuit of Zero Waste
This film follows the efforts of the city of San Francisco to reach zero waste.
This film follows the efforts of the city of San Francisco to reach zero waste.
In this essay, Watt recounts discussions with her students regarding lifestyle patterns; she shows how it will be necessary to change such patterns if we are to take climate change seriously from an economic and policy perspective, and to tackle it realistically.
The paper highlights shortcomings in GMO public consultation practices in the European Union and in one of its member countries, Finland. Specifically, they do not serve democracy, increase consensus, enable better decisions to be made, or establish trust.
Is a world without waste truly achievable? The essays in this volume of RCC Perspectives discuss zero waste as a vision, as a historical concept, and as an international practice. Going beyond the motto of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” they reflect on the feasibility of creating closed material cycles and explore real-world examples of challenges and successes on the way to zero waste.
Taking on the big players in media technology, whose business choices are dictating the changes and transitions in our society and environment, Köpnick questions the economics and ethics behind mobile phone production. He envisions a situation where company strategies are turned around to reduce waste and wastage, and thereby begin to benefit the environment, consumer and company alike.
The participants in a roundtable discussion that took place in May 2013 at LMU’s Center for Advanced Studies draw on their collective experience in engineering, anthropology, environmental justice, and city politics, in order to explore the impact of waste, and the strategies we should, and currently do, employ as we work towards zero waste in the world.
Inspiration for sustainable waste policies and management will likely come from countries in the Global South, where consumerism and discard-oriented production are not yet fully established, where economies are less fixated on growth, and people’s lifestyles are not yet “cocooned in the consumption bubble.” Drawing on examples of informal and cooperative recyclers in Brazil, Gutberlet argues that these workers have developed effective practices and policies supporting circular economy, sufficiency, and solidarity.
The interview with Piero Bevilacqua touches on a broad range of subjects: From the use of pesticides to the “Green Revolution”; from GMOs to biodynamic and biological agriculture, and the respect of biodiversity; from modern farming’s wasteful use of water to Common Agricultural Policy with its nonsustainable exploitation of farmland.
The central theme of this article is the mirage of growth that spread in Latin American countries under the influence of the United States, during and after World War II. This historical period had significant material consequences on world landscapes, as well as a symbolic impact through the rise of the ideal of Big Science, which aggravated the material environmental impacts.