Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (29 page)

Johnson is an artist by training, though the gallery showings and artistic output have taken a backseat to her small business, Be Simple, which helps other people de-clutter and de-trash their homes and lives as she has done. She is also very French, her heritage and accent equally strong. She pronounces her name BAY-a; her younger son, Leo, is LAY-o. She first came to America as an au pair, fell in love with California and a young business consultant named Scott Johnson, and they married. They lived in Europe for four years, then returned to the States to raise their family. Bea says she was determined to live the American Dream, and she thought she knew exactly what that was supposed to look like. “It meant the big house, the walk-in closet, the SUV, the yard with the dog and the white-picket fence. And stuff. Lots of stuff. With a big garage filled with more stuff.”

The Johnsons had that and then some. Bea became a recreational shopper. Friends would come to visit and they’d go shop for fun, because that’s what you did. She’d walk into Target and come out with a bag of purchases and a hundred dollars more debt on her credit card and, a week later, have no idea what she spent it on. Keeping the house in order, the kitchen clean, the kids’ clothes picked up all seemed like a full-time job. Beneath the kitchen sink there was a jungle of plastic bottles containing every type of polish and cleaner known to man—window cleaner, tile cleaner, floor cleaner, cleanser powder, hand soap, dish soap. The medicine chest looked like a shelf at the supermarket. The trash cans were full every week.

Then came the move. The family had lived for seven years in that big house in Pleasant Hill, but as the boys grew, Bea and Scott increasingly missed the ability to walk places that they had so enjoyed in France. Their community was designed for the car. So they chose a more walkable city, Mill Valley, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. They rented an apartment near the town center, and started looking for a house, with a majority of their things in storage. They ended up taking a year before they found the right home at the right price. By then, they had grown accustomed to living with less. The kids barely noticed. Scott was busy with a new business—he had quit his secure job with the regular paycheck and launched a start-up sustainability consultancy with three partners—and so he ceded household decisions to Bea. And she loved the new order. Everything was easier. There was less cleaning, less organizing. It was voluntary simplicity, and she persuaded her husband they should make it permanent. It was a good time to economize, she added, and this would be the perfect way to do so.

When they found a new house with about 1,200 square feet plus a small basement, that cinched matters. The furniture and boxes in storage weren’t going to fit. They ended up selling 80 percent of it—the extra sets of china, the extra clothes, the gadgets and sporting goods nobody used. All gone. They furnished the house in clean, elegant whites, uncluttered countertops, largely unadorned walls and a sectional couch in the living room that could be separated into chairs, converted to a guest bed and reconfigured in a host of other ways. They put their habits under a magnifying glass, looking for ways to simplify and de-clutter. If they had been saving things that just sat on a shelf, untouched and dusty, out they went. Books that had been read but were not treasures were sold; the library would fill their reading needs.

Next came reading and research on the environmental consequences of waste—of plastics in the ocean, of consumer chemicals in the human body, of the rise of packaging as the number one source of trash, of recycling as more panacea than solution, because most plastics had only a few recycles in them before they reached an end state as trash. Bea began to focus on minimizing waste, looking for alternatives for things they bought and consumed that made trash. Was there a non-trash alternative? In most cases, she found, the answer was yes. That didn’t mean giving up nice things or denying themselves. They weren’t living in rags or eating granola. They were simply saying no to the disposable economy and everything that came with it. “We didn’t become hippies,” she laughs. “Living with less doesn’t mean living poorly.”

There was a learning curve to this process of zero-waste discovery, requiring experimentation, research and a false start here and there (like the failed attempt to make laundry detergent). But over time, the Johnsons have made their habits and their home a model of waste
less
ness. Not perfect, not absolute. But they have made an impressive assault on the 102-ton legacy.

Bea says it wasn’t hard to identify consumerism—the accumulation of stuff—as the main engine of waste, disorganization and unnecessary expense. So she added a fourth “R” to the traditional 3 Rs of green living—reduce, reuse and recycle. The fourth R is “refuse,” as in refusing offers of disposable goods, processed foods and other items that fall into the broad category she calls “crap.” “Refuse, refuse, refuse,” she says, almost turning it into a chant. “Just say no, no, no. Someone offers you a free pen at a conference, some knickknack you’ll just throw in a drawer, some piece of crap you don’t need—say no. Refuse. Because every time you say yes, you are inviting more to be made. You have created demand for more waste. So we refuse all of that.”

The same attitude carries over to purchases. More than 10 percent of the cost of things lies in the packaging. So the Johnsons refuse packaged goods, plastic bottles, single-use bags. They buy in bulk. Stainless steel pump dispensers hold shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom, filled with bulk purchases at the market. A glass jar holds the tooth powder Bea makes from baking soda and a bit of the herbal sweetener stevia—no plastic toothpaste tubes and caps for this zero-waste house. Scott uses old-school double-edged razor blades in a stainless steel razor; the blades come in a tiny box with virtually no packaging, and each one lasts six months. A bar of rich Turkish soap provides the lather for shaving instead of canned or tubed foam. An alum stone serves as a natural deodorant for the whole family. Vinegar and water with a touch of castile soap is the Johnsons’ single household cleaner, used on floors, counters, walls, glass, bathrooms—everything. The bulk castile is put in reusable pumps in kitchen and bathroom, used to wash dishes, hands, pets. Washable microfiber cloths are used for cleaning—no paper towels. The family does buy toilet paper, but only the kind wrapped in paper—plastic film and wrap is public enemy number one in the low-waste home. You won’t find any in the well-stocked pantry, either: The shelves are filled with mason jars—“the French type, with the lids attached—they’re much better,” Johnson says. The jars hold grains, pasta, snacks, cereal, cookies, beans—all the items of any well-stocked pantry, except none of it comes in boxes, cans or plastic containers. She has a hundred of these jars in varying sizes—they’re dishwasher, freezer and refrigerator safe.

But it is different, a major deviation from the norm that can induce near states of shock in visitors. Friends of her older son, Max, were over one day looking for a snack. They opened the fully stocked pantry, saw no cardboard boxes, plastic or foil-wrapped cookies—none of the familiar disposable packages—and said, “You don’t have any food.” The shelves were full of mason jars, including a row filled with kid-friendly snacks. But they might as well have been invisible.

Bea grocery shops once a week. First she gets produce at the farmers’ market, tucked into a reusable mesh bag, then she moves to the one local grocery store that offers a large selection of bulk goods, from pasta to peanut butter, cookies to couscous. She brings three reusable shopping totes with a number of mason jars in them. Her market weighs the empty jars, then she can use them to purchase cuts of meat, fish, cheese and salad bar items. Her standing order for ten loaves of French baguettes is waiting for her; she cuts them in half, puts them in a pillow case, and stores the bread in her freezer, doling it out during the week, warming it in the oven. The bread can be safely frozen this way; Johnson says most people think it must be hermetically sealed in plastic to protect the flavor, but this simply is not true. Johnson buys a local dairy brand of milk that comes in returnable, reusable glass bottles. She keeps two big mason jars of flour on hand all the time for baking—quiche, pizza, cookies. Because the bulk foods are all on the periphery of the market, and she never ventures down the maze of center aisles where all the cans and processed food are shelved, she usually finishes her weekly shopping faster than most people.

She shops for clothes twice a year, fall and spring, and limits her wardrobe to seven shirts, two skirts, one pair of shorts, three pairs of pants, three sweaters, three dresses and six pairs of shoes (including slippers). The rest of the family has a similar clothing inventory. Secondhand and thrift shops are the first line of attack in the clothing hunt, reuse being high on the list of low-waste commandments. Bea was particularly proud of one spring expedition in which she restocked the whole family’s wardrobe for forty bucks, including several Abercrombie T-shirts for the boys at $1 apiece.

There are frustrations: Junk mail can’t be refused, so it has to be recycled, the least desirable of the 4 Rs. She also resents the big folders of school pictures that come home every year whether you want them or not. She has repeatedly complained about the paper and plasticized strips that come off the mailing envelopes for DVDs from Netflix, but the company hasn’t responded. She has taken to slipping the pieces of trash back in mailers and returning it to the company for disposal.

In the end, the result of all this waste reduction is a freeing up of Bea’s time.

“Most people, the first thing they say is, all this fighting waste must take up so much time and effort. It must be exhausting. And I say, just the opposite. I have more time than ever for family activities, for art, for whatever I like. I spend less time shopping, less time cleaning, less time picking up. I’ve never been happier or more relaxed.”

There’s also the question of sacrifice. Virtually everyone assumes that Bea and her family have made enormous sacrifices by giving up so much in order to become less wasteful. But is having only one set of dinner plates really a sacrifice? Does she really need more than six pairs of shoes? How much of a sacrifice is it to make her own mustard in her own containers, when she can make a year’s supply in about fifteen minutes at a fraction of the cost of store-bought condiments? Is it a sacrifice to take five minutes to mix some water and vinegar and liquid soap together in a stainless steel spray bottle and use it for all her household cleaning (and yes, it works great, she says) rather than buying a half dozen disposable bottles of cleaner at fifty times the price? Refusing things—and, specifically, disposable things—should not be confused with sacrifice, she says. Once upon a time, it used to require a sacrifice to
buy
something. You saved up, you gave up things you might want just so you could put enough money aside to purchase something big or long-lasting or vital. Now, she says, people tend to think the sacrifice is
not
buying. That’s one reason we are swimming in waste, Bea says. In her view, not buying is never a sacrifice. It’s a way of saving up for something really important, or saving time, or saving the planet. Or all three.

Her whole family has taken part in these efforts with enthusiasm, though the boys sometimes grumble about the limits on toy accumulation. Each has two bins, and all toys—Legos, trucks, whatever—must fit in them. If that means parting with something to make room for incoming, so be it. Her older son, Max, has nevertheless embraced the zero-waste philosophy with aplomb, including demonstrating for his fifth-grade class—and in a YouTube video—a Japanese cloth-folding technique for making a waste-free lunch. He makes a sandwich to bring to school, then does an intricate fold that turns a cloth napkin into a multi-compartment tube that holds the sandwich and a piece of fruit or a cookie, and rolls everything up into a compact parcel. At lunch, the cloth becomes his place mat during eating, and his napkin afterward. Then he puts it into his backpack to be taken home and reused or washed as needed. No paper, no wrap, no baggies, no trash.

For birthdays and Christmas, the family emphasizes the giving of experiences rather than things. Trips and outings, hikes, camping, movies, museums, amusement parks—things the family can do together, relish and remember. They have a living tree they haul in every year for Christmas and decorate with heirloom ornaments.

But Bea says their wasteless lifestyle is neither fanatical nor absolute. The boys desperately wanted a Wii video game system and the Johnsons, after much debate, said yes. Now Max wants a cell phone and his own computer, which his parents are resisting for the moment, despite the dreaded “all the other kids have them” argument. Battling the multimillion-dollar advertising budget of the consumer economy with the word “refuse” is and always will be a challenge, Bea says.

After about two years into the low-waste lifestyle, Bea started a blog about her experiences, “The Zero Waste Home,” which offered both a narrative on her family’s quest and tips for others interested in trying their own hands at the “4 Rs.” The blog, in turn, generated news media interest, and eventually
Sunset
magazine showed up in Mill Valley to write about Bea Johnson’s efforts and to create a photo spread and report on her home as part of a series entitled “Inspired Homes of the West.”

The article drew tremendous reader interest—and some strong emotions. Six months after the article appeared online, comments were still flowing in, nearly seven hundred of them. Many people were inspired. They loved the Johnson home’s smooth surfaces and open space, and the main work of art in the living room—a “living wall” of plants, green and lush. One reader admiringly called the magazine photos “minimalist porn.”

But a sizable minority of comments were dismissive, critical or just plain mean. Bea was attacked for eating beef and therefore supporting a wasteful and environmentally damaging industry. She was pilloried for an annual trip to visit family in France because she didn’t adhere to her zero-waste practices there, and left behind an enormous carbon footprint since air travel is one of the most wasteful of human activities. She was criticized for choosing compostable toothbrushes made in Australia—their carbon footprint is huge, one commenter sneered. (Responded Bea: Her choice isn’t perfect, but still better than plastic toothbrushes, especially since almost all of them are made in China with an equally big transportation footprint.) There was an undercurrent of anger in those comments, as if the Johnsons’ lifestyle constituted an attack on the commenters’ choices and values. Some called her mentally ill, delusional, a child abuser (what, no junk food?) or an obsessive-compulsive. Their home and lives were deemed barren and stripped of creativity. They were fanatics who would destroy the country if their ideas were to spread. Singled out for derision was the family’s practice of digitally photographing the kids’ artwork, then recycling the paper copies. In all, the comments were so numerous and strong that one university professor left a note saying he was assigning his psychology class to study the responses.