Hello 27^th Eco-gen Regional Ambassadors! This is Hannah from Korea, and I’ll be your mentor with Joon ‘til Febuary, 2022. Let’s have great time together.

This September, our topic is ‘Zero Waste’. Many of you would have heard of the term zero waste. Please post an article about it within September. Feel free to write down what you know or what you want to know about zero waste through preliminary research.

I would like to introduce a brief introduction to the zero waste and some things to be careful about while executing zero waste movement in real life.

Zero waste, as its name implies, is an environmental movement that aims to eliminate waste at all, and the Zero Waste International Alliance (ZWIA) defines:

Zero waste: preserving all resources through responsible production, consumption, reuse and recovery, without burning all products, packaging and materials, without discharging them into land, ocean and air that could threaten the environment or human health.

If you go to the ZWIA website (https://zwia.org), you can see data on zero waste and supportive policies, and there is information that September 18 is World Cleanup Day as well. As Tunza ambassadors, it would be great to join the cleanup day. 😊

Author Bea Johnson, who wrote a famous book on tips to practice zero waste at home, is said to produce only one bottle of trash a year, as shown in the picture below. Don’t you think it's gonna take a lot of effort?

It would be nice if everyone could join this zero waste movement, but there are also things to think about in this environmental movement. First, in terms of the name 'Zero waste', the goal is not to create a small amount of waste, but to get rid of it altogether. In life, zero waste can be just ideal or success in the distant future, because completely eliminating waste requires completely changing factory-produced products and creating policies that are much different from the present. Even if results that match the name ‘zero waste’ are not achieved, we will need to make efforts to practice them steadily. Also, as with many environmentalist movements, we should be careful of the differences between goals and implementation in reality. For example, one might try not to buy a product in a plastic bottle at a convenience store and drive to school just in front of your house, what a contradiction?

Waste comes from anywhere, anytime, and behind every product is the generation of many wastes. It would be very important to be critical of your consumption habits while being aware of the zero-waist movement, but to go further, the policy on the industry will have to change significantly.

It’s the first starting month as a Tunza embassador, please be aware of environmental issues for the next six months and write a great article. Please write a designated topic and a free topic article starting from this September! Way to go!

Picture from: https://zerowastehome.com/photos/