More than 500 students and community members participated in the second annual Zero Waste Week, a challenge that encourages participants to produce as little waste as possible while attending educational events and receiving informational emails to learn about being zero-waste. The week culminated in a trash pickup event at the Michigan League’s Courtyard Garden, where attendees celebrated the week with raffle drawings, food in returnable containers from El Harissa and reflections on how to improve the week for next year’s events.
The challenge is a partnership between the Environmental Consulting Organization at the University of Michigan and ZeroWaste.Org, an independent organization founded by U-M alumni and siblings Lydia McMullen-Laird and Samuel McMullen. LSA sophomore Ashley Tasmaan, project manager for ECO-UM, said Zero Waste Week provides an accessible and low-stakes introduction to zero-waste living.
“The purpose is to teach the students here and provide resources on how to start living a zero-waste lifestyle,” Tasmaan said. “For me personally, I’ve always wanted to, but I didn’t know how simple it was. Especially on YouTube, it seemed like such a big process, but here our whole ideology is to start small.”
Throughout the week, ECO-UM and ZeroWaste.Org hosted a variety of events that encouraged zero-waste practices, including a zero-waste business roundtable discussion, a clothing swap and mending event, a social-restoration panel and a zero-waste cooking demonstration. Business freshman Batule Hamka attended the cooking event, facilitated by Samuel McMullen, and said she was surprised to learn how small zero-waste changes in the kitchen could be easily implemented in her daily life.
“I went in not having many set expectations and just wanted to learn more about the cooking aspect of zero waste because cooking is something we do every day,” Hamka said. “I feel like it was a really practical way to make a change. … It was just really cool to see in front of me how easy it can be to reduce waste in the kitchen.”
LSA junior Anna Kovarzin attended the clothing mending event and said repairing her broken clothes would extend their lifetime and prevent her from generating unnecessary waste.
“I liked the mending event a lot,” Kovarzin said. “I just happened to rip a pair of my pants the day before, and they were so great. They helped me fix them. They look great, and now I choose to keep them for longer.”
By attending these zero-waste events, participants were entered into raffles to win prizes at the Saturday celebration. The prizes were specifically chosen to avoid generating waste and included a free bike from Common Cycle, a community bike repair center, and a gift card to the Detroit Filling Station, which participates in a returnable container program through A2Zero, the City of Ann Arbor’s carbon neutrality initiative. In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Lydia McMullen-Laird said she also asked for slightly damaged goods from vendors like Bivouac to prevent them from going to waste.
“Who cares about if that little defect is there?” McMullen-Laird said. “We tried to not have people give us new stuff and not have people give us stuff that will create more waste for the prizes too. So a lot of those businesses are also in that category when they’re trying to do something.”
ZeroWaste.Org was founded by the McMullen-Laird siblings after they conducted research on climate change and air pollution in Beijing in 2015. Lydia McMullen-Laird said witnessing both the waste and the health issues caused by production practices motivated her and her brother to promote a zero-waste lifestyle.
“We just felt like this is something we wanted to do in terms of a lifestyle shift and an awareness shift to put less pressure both on the environment but also on people who live along the production cycle,” Lydia McMullen-Laird said. “That’s kind of how we got started with ZeroWaste.Org. Starting the awareness is starting with people’s personal lifestyles as a way to learn more about what’s happening on the production cycle. We’ve always felt like people’s personal lifestyles are a good place to start.”
Engineering sophomore Rakshak Shah, technology consultant for ECO-UM, said he believes the University should work to help increase student awareness of the waste they produce.
“I think it definitely could have very large impacts because part of the challenge is to track all of the waste throughout the week,” Shah said. “Students at this college are one of the most wasteful groups, especially just based on the dining halls. ECO had a specific dining hall waste project where we tried to optimize how they handle the waste in the dining halls.”
Tasmaan said she hopes events like Zero Waste Week will bring more attention to eco-friendly efforts on campus.
“I think that the University is doing a great job trying, it’s just not a lot of students are getting the information,” Tasmaan said. “I think having events like ours kind of forces it in front of people and forces people to actually make the realization that there really is a problem and there’s something that we can do. The resources are there. We’re just not aware of them.”
Lydia McMullen-Laird said she believes encouraging people to measure how much trash they produce during challenges like Zero Waste Week will expose the scale of waste production in the U-M community.
“Awareness is half the battle because trash is so easily invisible,” McMullen-Laird said. “You just throw out your trash can. It’s gone. You don’t live next to the landfill. I think what Zero Waste Week forces you to do is kind of be aware of it and have what we’ll call trash goggles. At a certain point very early on, you start to be like, ‘Oh my god, there’s trash everywhere.’ Without that eye-opening switch going on, it’s hard to solve the problem if you don’t see where it’s happening in your own life.”
Daily Staff Reporter Marissa Corsi can be reached at macorsi@umich.edu.