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one zero no ok so travis is a here we are here it is our zero waste stream here on changes the show about sustainability so let us not waste any more time or our listeners attention here let travis what do you have for us today how thank you justin today i've got a few interviews that i recorded while i was lucky enough to be in san francisco bay area for their zero waste week couple weeks ago and i went around to lots of different facilities and different conferences and just absorbed a lot of cool ideas that they have going on there for zero waste a lot of us focused on  food waste there yeah specially you know with california with all the farms and water than water shortages them but totally yeah yeah so that was foremost a lot of people's minds and i visited some cool places one of them will be the first interview i have here which is with deborah monk from recall a g in san francisco they have a big transfer station and recycling center their education center as well and she runs their artist in residence program through yeah it's really cool it kind of takes that idea of trash to treasure to a new level and it was a really nice idea to see put in motion because at the n r a you were always getting items and thinking well for only this found the right person or right person came in they could do something great with this so this is the story of the right people finding things yes they brought the right they all that they did is instead of counting on the right person to be there they brought the right people to their facilities that they could find those treasures and make them into amazing art yeah well nice nice let's get this yet let's play the interview it's ok so now i am at recall a g s transfer station in san francisco with deborah monk the director of the artist in residence the program in their environmental education classroom and she's going to tell us a little bit about that program the artist in residence program was established in one nine hundred ninety as a way to promote recycling and resource conservation while supporting the local arts community so we worked with over one hundred thirty artist bay area artist spend four months with a shopping cart and they scavenge in the public disposal area it's like a drop off area and they take materials back to their studio and at the end of the florence we have an exhibition and they're wildly popular hundreds and hundreds of people come to see the work eat a meal and scavenge through the giveaway pile so do the artists also sell their works here and make some money yes all of the artwork is for sale that funding go back to recall the or the artist or is there a donation or any we operate kind of under the same system as a gallery would we do a sixty forty split with sixty percent to sixty percent goes to the artists and i did meet one of the artists today on my tour of the facility can you tell us what he's working on weston therea works mainly with paper and he's recreating some of the things that he finds in the public disposal area recreating as in reimagining them into something new or trying to just bring them back to their original life well for instance if he finds he found a chair metal chair and he made it remade it entirely out of paper is there any people who are going to be listening to this can view some of these works on a website or anything like that yes go to recall a g dot coms website and you'll see a link to the artist in residence program or you can just type in art at the dump recall a g san francisco art it sounds really cool so yeah my tour as well i also have to see a little bit outside there are some cool reclaimed materials in a sort of a garden patio area that's used to show tours around an educator public on i guess just reusing everyday items so we have three gardens in the one that you're probably talking about is the one that's right behind the art studio and we have a vegetable garden and we built beds out of reclaimed wood with the intention of showing folks that you can grow food in anything and we also have a three acre sculpture garden on site where we housed over twenty five sculptures made by past artists and we have a gardener in residence program that we just started last year where gardeners are landscape artists will spend three to six months and they'll kind of choose a space in the garden and pull out like invasive plants and plant natives and other non invasive plants i did see both those in the sculpture it was especially interesting it was really neat for a couple reasons first of which everything's just a little bit couple weeks or months ahead of what everything is good doing back in d c growing so it's nice to see everything in bloom and see the bees in the hummingbirds flying around already and of course the sculptures and all  that all those in artworks are very interesting as well and the third thing was the invasive you mentioned is interesting to see that you're dealing with a lot of the same invasive as we're dealing with on vancouver island i saw lot of black berry a lot of ivy which is something that we struggle with as well in our forests in our clearings and anywhere that there is light so it's nice to see some common work going into that so i heard a little bit about the garden gardener and residency program are there plans to expand that or i think it was launched a little while ago that gardener and residents program started last year and the garden is three acres and it's the ivy and the blackberries are just overtaking and we can't keep up with it so i thought what a great way to kind of involve the local gardeners in our efforts to pull back and plant more native plants and so we've had three artists or three gardeners and they've all done really different they've all had really different projects our first gardener peter good to down a pine tree that was dead and created a seeding area and then took out a huge amount of ivy and planted all native grasses are second artist laura martin's this kind of working with displacement she built the boat and she's planting grasses and again pulled out just tons and tons of literally i bet of ivy yeah something that's become very popular around thank you for allan a lot of the schools where a lot of them are lucky enough to have a forest behind them or just some some wild area is they're building outdoor classrooms in the middle of these forests with you know log benches and things like that so they can take plesance outside or in your classroom here but would you consider building an outdoor one for the tours in the school that come through well we we provide about one hundred fifty tours a year half of those are for kids and the other half are for adults every tour group does go outside and they spend time in the garden we've just recently started a volunteer project where we'll have will work with the high school class then they'll go into the garden we'll actually have them helpless pull out the i v and we'll have a section where a learning session well we'll talk about the importance of not invasive plants and native planting excellent yeah and that community involvement reminds me as well that when i was on the tour it was explained to me that the garden was built for a specific purpose in regards to the facility in the community nearby the garden was designed by such a big space so it's called the garden of hopes and dreams and it was initially a barrier between the neighborhood and our facility kind of a sound barrier and since then it's just like it's it's just such a beautiful space with with many many sculptures and lots of trees and plants and you know it was really apparent when we there we went on the tour we were leaving in the transfer building where all the trucks and bulldozers were doing their work just walked up a short staircase and were in the garden and it doesn't amazing job of that separating that sound and providing a habitat and just being a nice calming place to be and i also remember there was a lot of cool reclaimed material that went into it especially the the pathway as well i think freddie was explaining that to me the pathway of the garden is made out of recycled concrete from the freeway after the nine hundred eighty nine loma prieta earthquake a part of the free it was taken down and we used some of that concrete for the math there are some bricks that lined the path that were taken out of a building on mission street many years ago that was remodeled a lot of the plants on the east side of the garden are from the trash we found them and we used our compost and we transplanted them right i forgot about that we were shown all around and a lot of the plants growing on this facility were were ones that were just found in the trash and saved from the dump that's or from the compost i should say which is really cool to see just that common thread as well i was remembering it was really really nice common connection to see the same invasive as we're dealing with in our own ways but also the common thread of growing food in any place which is something a lot of people hold near and dear god thank you allan because as i was saying before we started this interview food security and that issues really foremost in a lot of people's minds it was really nice to see again the same grow your own ethic and just re reuse and being resourceful well if you can grow food at the transfer station you can grow food anywhere and it's really important there's a lot of kids that live in urban environments that aren't they don't know that carrots are you know grown in dirt and they they've been i've seen groups of kids that were they'll say well how did you get that in there when we've had them pull carrots out of the ground or you know i have to force feed them sugar peas because they've never taste they've just never tasted it so yeah i think it's very very important for all of us at least to know how to grow even if it's just something simple like herbs if everybody crew just something i think would make a huge difference yeah that reminds me in my work i go visit a lot of schools and it's a very popular workshop for me to talk about compost and bring the worms from my backyard into show children i always ask where does food come from and where does this carrot come from and inevitably even where i live and where the children live with plants and trees everywhere inevitably the answer of the store always comes up with east once or twice it's a very different experience even from my from my parents generation my grandmother she sugar a lot of her food she lived in nevada and i always remember when she wanted to make pie she would go pick the rhubarb and make a rhubarb pie but it's just something very unfamiliar to kids these days so that's a very common theme and it's good to see that this facilities here are doing this work and educating and also just providing san francisco with a place to display a disposable lot of materials that we saw a lot of things being recycled and taken care of responsibly in the same way sounded really neat i love that idea of the art and what was the what was i know in the thing you were talking about things that you were walking on and stuff in the plants there what was one of the most interesting things you saw in there the one of the visual things that wasn't in the interview well in addition to the gardens and the sculpture garden she mentioned in the artist workshop where they're working on their creations there's also this sort of hill that it's kind of inaccessible the landscape it or do anything they're ok so the staff that works at the facility there they aren't part of the artist residency program but they have decorated it themselves with with cool things that come into their their facility like mannequins i'm just old we dead that people have to kind of make like at their own sculpture garden of their of the untrained artists there and that was a really neat landscape to see and have all these kind of shapes watching likely you know walking around the facility nice nice i like it i like it a lot ok well you know so you are listening to changes the show on sustainability that was travis interviewing deborah deborah monk down in san francisco all of our interviews today are from down in san francisco you said you were there for a conference right yeah so i was there it was there's your waste week not just in physical but the entire bay area which it took me awhile to get used to it's large there's lots of lots of different communities there  human resources and ideas and people to talk to in lots of different facilities to go around to so yeah that was recalled in san francisco i also talked to some people in berkeley and marin county which is on the north side of the bay  and i think i have a yeah and some of the other interviews are from the zero waste youth convergence which was also that week so there was the recycling update which is their big get together on big can conference of ideas i also did  organic facility tour which included an anaerobic digester where they take some of their composable zz to be digested by bacteria into methane which he uses to run the collection trucks and also a small generator on that site and then the  go to nearby farms for fertilizer and one of the other really great facilities on that tour was a company called imperfect produce ok yeah so they're on the east bay in berkeley and they have connections with farms in the area of course there's lots and lots of farms in the area and so what they do is they're trying to eliminate food waste at that farm level so they informed us that there's three billion pounds  with beets that they just harvest because they took a few samples and they didn't grow round enough for the grocery store oh wow so part of that gets taken to food banks as well ok on interfering with that supply but they're taking a greater remainder of that which is even going to food banks there's still a lot of produce left so there's that example there's also things like peppers that grew in a funny shape or to me ones that look like exactly like all these things that are perfectly round or perfectly right for anything like that and then they have subscribers like they have twenty five hundred now they're looking to get up to ten thousand subscribers in the bay area mostly right now they're in oakland and berkeley with just starting to live deliver to you every weekend because they're in california they get a really nice mix of everything yeah we i was a great idea i was thinking about how we could do it here but i was also realizing we'd be a bit limited in our choices but it would still still be a very worthy endeavor zero waste conference focused on high schoolers university students and young professionals which i still consider myself to be so i was there meeting with some of the zero waste youth guys at a vigil and i met here when we had those we a conference fall a couple october's ago ok and he gauges part of the clean oceans international organization that's clean oceans i n t l dot org if anyone wants to check it out more and yeah they have a bunch of young volunteers in high school and  university and they're working on a cool project to help the residents of you lift the atoll which we will talk about so it's another interesting story and they're founder he mentions him by his nickname in the interview is jim home he calls him homer  in san francisco at the city college campuses go ocean campus learning all these wonderful locations well i'm here and i'm with gage from the clean oceans project international who just gave a little talk about plastics and debris in the ocean indeed hello talking about plastics to fuel was the subject and that's a technology we've sort of recently come across and decided could really make a difference and so we have purchased a big new awesome machine and have it at can breo college right now app california and it is to my knowledge the only place in the world were a new latest and greatest one is open to the public to do science on do experiments on so we are working with u c s c in cumbria and the chemistry departments to test all the emissions and make sure that it is actually a safe technology before we endorse it but we have many plans if it does no red flags sounds excellent so one of the sources of the plastic is people's regular recycling or is the only things are gathering from beaches in the ocean indeed so in the experimentation process we've obviously used a wide range we've used sort of virgin like virgin plastic that's completely new and clean and seeing what that produced and we've used dirty plastic that we actually collected off the beach and on that note if there is organic matter on it it should just end up as char in the machine because it works by vaporizing the plastic distilling it so it just gets left behind but for our purposes we're using a wide range of plastic for experiments but in terms of implementation of the machine it shines in ireland communities where there's a lot of trash washing up it obviously shines in any minas a pallet dump that has however many tons of plastic funneled through it a day for their recycling center you know there's no reason to not turn that into running your tractors so you see this is more of a salvaged last step for plastic that maybe can't get recycled or was already maybe improperly disposed of and ended up on a beach in the ocean or in a landfill does it also look like it could be used for plastic types that aren't currently accepted for recycling yes two things on that i guess first of all it's a very important thing to just put forward that this is not a solution in the way that you know even solar other alternatives if we are at the end of the day still burning hydrocarbons but the idea is that if you can burn you know a gallon of gasoline in your car that is comprised of water bottles picked up off the beach rather than pay you know oil company to go drill new oil that's a good thing and also it sort of serves to raise awareness about the whole problem but yes it is not a you know one hundred percent it's a stopgap measure is what we've been saying there is just a phenomenal amount of petroleum literally laying around and we are going to be stuck with all these machines we built for another twenty years at least you know that run off petroleum so if that could be run by picking up the beaches rather than drilling for new oil i say i'd check that off yeah so i've seen i saw you a little samples outside  your table so it does make a pretty clean looking liquid fuel then yeah you are saying that there is a great abundance of well plastic preserves and in your presentation you brought up a pretty unique case with an island that was looking into that this technology and maybe using that plastic that's well literally all around them super unique case very well actually maybe not as unique as you would hope but so we have this relationship going on with a atoll in m the toll and nutshell their situation basically during world war two in fortifying the west coast against the japanese offensive that never happened we went to their island with the us government and completely cleared it and made an airstrip out of it so cleared all their trees and just totally devastated their whole system and then the japanese didn't attack and we said ok well sorry by here's ten million dollars and so they're just sitting there on their island on top of their pile of money without any trees to make canoes and so they're like all right i guess we'll just pay the you government for doing building supplies until our money goes you know just terrible and then also of course they have you know power they literally burn a huge pile of plastic every week because there's nothing else to do with so much that's washing up you can't bury it it's not coming from them they don't even know what it is i mean the no that's plastic but so you know this plastic is there they don't bring it in as packaging for food or anything like that it's just left over cast offs on the beach you know there is a there are supplies that they have to buy do come packaged in plastic but that is fractional compared to what washes up every day and that's sort of the big thing is that you know that there's nothing they can do about it and instead they literally either try to throw back into the ocean in which case just washes right back up or they burn into the just kind of no options so recently relatively recently there reefs just died very suddenly and all like all life took a huge dip and they sent out sort of an international cry for help which somehow was received by nicole crane who is a biology professor at breo and just kind of a legend super awesome and she went there and pretty quickly deduced that hey you guys are actually fishing unsustainably are fishing in a very small radius around there on your island and they actually said yeah we know that we can't do our native you know our traditional fishing practices because we can't afford  get a far enough away from our island and we have to budget our money and so what they did is they ended up killing all the parrot fish which are what break down bite the reef and make it in the sense of just crucial you know key key species and so in looking for solutions to that problem if we came since works pretty closely with clean oceans international and nicole works for cabrio her and homer got connected and we're thought oh my god plastics to fuel you know so obviously you know there's many more things that need to be done there but if we put one of these machines there suddenly the natives there will have they'll be independent they will be able to have an independent sustainable fishing operations is just i mean you can't just solve all their problems they no longer have to pay for fuel and they can now pay them stare you know they can sustain their own fishing operations and do it the way they know they should be doing it and eventually bills start accruing you know capital resource for the  tribe and so they can help their surrounding islands and and yet just having something to do with all with the piles of plastic every week yeah all while cleaning up their beach that's there that's a very cool application for this technology so i'm glad to see that expedition we did the one our two thousand and sixteen expedition was to hawaii were we talked to well that was that but the one before that we went up to prince william sound in alaska and work with the gulf of alaska keepers that was who we directly worked with  but we sort of that was a big sort of influx of information about what's going on up there and so i think homer is really it i would not be surprised ok so very cool thank you very  much and yeah it's good seeing you and a nice presentation nice optimistic presentation here at the convergence this year indeed yeah thanks man all right and here we are it is nice to hear youth and optimism all these kinds of things that sounds wonderful yeah that was definitely one of the best parts of going to the youth convergence was that it wasn't all just doom and gloom because sometimes they go to the the adult conferences and it is it's important to hear but it's also a downer drive going on right now to raise money for the for the airwaves keeping our equipment up and there are all sorts of cool the things so you should be getting onto the website c h l y dot ca slash donate we have a toll free number one eight five five seven four zero one zero one seven and our local number here is two five zero seven zero one six three four one zero i do see someone who has come into the booth here let us just have a quick little chat with it jumping that's really interesting stuff you guys are talking about it's been good to hear on our radio and of the wise who would know about a conference going on in there exactly is that connecting the local yeah the local to the international it's one of those the services that chile provides yes and so if this is important to our listeners we encourage them to call in donate you can you can call in i have my square i'm sitting here waiting to print something through my square and take your credit card money i know it's not easy to get down here you cannot you can come in we can run it through the square we take your card and run it through little square doodad that they what they call a square right but  you know if not we can take it over the phone as well to your credit card number with only if you're comfortable with out or you can go online if you're comfortable with that and do it online and it works through pay pal get some honestly not the easiest little system you have to you have to beat on your on your screen a couple of times yeah tear your hair a few times and then but it works it's a bit of a process getting it started but once you once you're in it's shockingly easy to spend money  h i've never i haven't because i'm here all the time i don't really need to use that system so i've never but i've hear from people that it's it's really confusing you know well just not a good thing maybe i should give it a bit i don't know but you know well it's one of those think this is what happens when we're we're using infrastructure that we it's not like i don't think part of the fun drive is to pay for our own payment processing they get to develop to buy a bunch of coders to develop our own pay pal competitor that is not one of the goals of the market right right no no no no no definitely not unless you want to do it i usually don't i really don't but thank you yes thank you for the offer all the way i  want to tell you guys up too much just you know it seems to me that we have in the past really pushed the fund drive you know we you know the whole thing you know you know let's we're not going to put a song on to you don't donate it's like we need we can't do it sponsorship we can't do it all from the college university we need community support as well right in and being a membership and being a member of the society is is one of those great ways to do it especially to do it with like a monthly donation and things that's that's awesome because then that gives that gives the station like what is it  renewable it's it's like it's a regular regular funding rather than one time gifts are even a better for us yes exactly we do like to we you know obviously membership is cheap relatively twenty dollars here is cheap  like to have a low barrier to participation but if you can afford ten dollars a month or you know or sustaining member a level of twenty dollars a month that would be great too you know all right here's a more interesting oh we are full of interesting stuff today let's see ok travis you know what let's let's just actually yeah jump right into our next one ok so we're going to be talking to hear this next interview is with catherine kellogg who i also met at the zero waste youth convergence she has a very interesting blog which gets mentioned in the interview but i'll say it again here it's going to waste dot com ok and it's the personal side of zero waste there's a lot of personal every day  ideas of how to live more zero waste lifestyle and yet just her story about how she was inspired to go down that path and you know it just comes up with some very interesting points and challenges some of our daily ideas about what we actually need to be a member of society well what more could you get from community radio all right let's head well i am with katherine coorg who is an activist blogger actor and probably a few other things print shop i work at a green print shop actually and your blog is going to waste dot com so where do the inspiration for this come from so when i was in college i started feeling this unbearable pain in my left breast and when i went to the doctor they found a lot of abnormal tumor growth and the whole experience really put my life into perspective i had never thought about what i was putting in or on my body i had never even questioned it i just assumed that everything that would be available for me would be safe and it was really wrong so thankfully the tumors were benign and i started overhauling everything i started cooking from scratch i started making my own cleaning products are making now beauty products which  workshop we were just and together and when i switched to an all natural deodorant my pain went away so that's really kind of how this whole thing started for me wow that's excellent so the lack of packaging in waste and class was kind of a side effect but that's really interesting to bring up because that attitude is one a lot of people have of just well it's out there it's been tested it's safe it's good it's the better product and i know people also tend to think with homemade homemade  soaps cleaners they aren't as good as well as the ones that are available in the store but you made a really cool chapstick in the workshop and told to put a few other things on one was i think your waist traveling was a good one as well yeah so some of my favorite products i make or dry shampoo i also make a soap bar and someone brought up a really really good point about how much time these things take to make so i have a rule in my role as if it has to have a six month shelf life so it has to last for six months or it's not sustainable because it's not sustainable to make a product every week that's really not sustainable so i want to make sure that whatever i'm making is uses a few ingredients takes a little time and lasts a long time travel is a really good a really good point that was brought up when i travel i'm a minimalist so i think that most things  i most things can be combated with a sixteen ounce mason jar napkin of course if i know that i'm going someplace i know i'm going grocery shopping or i know that i'm going to go somewhere like a special activity like today's workshop they asked us to bring plates you know if i know i'm bring here plus my water bottle to joe with so that was a that was a good thing to plan for like you said doing some cross border traveling is always not as easy with utensils and jars and things like though the time but it was a really cool workshop and what was the item you made actually and maybe you could just give us a quick break down of the steps where because it was fairly simple so i made chapstick and or let bomb is really really simple it is three parts cocoa butter to one part olive oil when i make it at home i make it with three tablespoons of cocoa butter grated and one tablespoon of all of oil and then i melt it on a double broiler i typically whenever i'm making pasta or if i am blanching some green beans and i've got boiling water i just throw my bowl on top of whatever i'm making for dinner because it makes it really easy because i'm already just standing there staring at a pot of boiling water right exactly and i melt it down it feels about two half ounce or quarter ounce ten's and it lasts about six months that's a good i really get a six month rule because you're talking about the time it takes and that's the thing like personal sustainability is people need to feel that they have the time to do these things and also sustain themselves in the other activities they do in life because not everyone going to spend their whole day making toothpaste and everything like another thing i saw that was really cool in your presentation was about the zero waste style where there was a really good story with your mom and you know you could tell people that also just a good message about the amount of things people have right so i love my mom i'm from arkansas and like i said i'm an actor so my accent has been pretty trained out of me but my mom talks i love it so i'll chip in on that a little bit later but what she says is her favorite thing about the zero waste lifestyle is she has catherine add just love how stylis your house looks have you seen those jars your house looks like a pinterest board and i think that's a really good thing also to still get people involved because it's like look look up pretty it looks which is always nice and her favorite thing is straw she's like catherine always rejects well that's a good place to start for sure a lot of people just get used to that and it's one of those automatic things as well that it's hard to intercept before you end up with one in your cups and so the good zero waste style with the jars i know that's something that's caught on with a lot of my friends circle and something i have in my house is used a lot of jars for it for drinking out of and all that but there was one other thing with your always style you had the challenge of was the one week challenge i think that's makes it really good story yes so i had this challenge to see because once again growing up where i grew up images very very very important to try yourself and i've always had a ton of clothes my mom's had a ton of clothes she dressed me until i was like in the sixth grade which was really embarrassing but i looked at my outfits were per coordinated and i probably had hundreds of them and so obviously now that i've become a little bit more awakened about how these products get to us i really wanted to change and so i wanted to do this experiment just see if really anyone noticed that we were different outfits or if it was just kind of on our mind so i wore the same shirt a week in a row to work to see if anyone would notice and i was like looking to see if he was looking at me funny no no one noticed no one cared no one had any idea that i was wearing the same shirt and it was a really liberating process so i went out and pretty much cleared out most all of my wardrobe and now i'm down to what i call an eighteen piece wardrobe it doesn't include accessories about eighteen accessories about eighteen actual piece of clothing and it's an experiment i will probably add some more wind up around fifty like long term but it's a really fun experiment to see how well a wardrobe that works together can easily prevent me from decision fatigue which is where you don't have to make the decisions of what to wear i just kind of know what i'm wearing and then also just making now and i look put together i just grab something and look ok yeah that's a really great point about the emphasis we put on it we're always worried about what other people think but it's usually just us the notices sad is that make us feel sometimes me but also with the limited wardrobe you can really pick either really nice articles that are maybe possibly locally made or at least better made than a lot of other articles of clothing out there or secondhand yes yeah that's definitely something a lot of people in the earliest community know about which is excellent so during the one we challenge as well and this was kind of brought up when you were telling people about making your own shampoos toothpaste was that you only wash your hair once every two weeks or so i want to similar schedule now myself after some experimenting with baking soda mostly it kept my hair really clean it also gave me some highlights that weren't really intentional but people like to so it was but i'm on about the same schedule about once every two weeks and yeah it's not really noticeable but i think it's kind of like that it factor i could kind of tell a few people in the audience when you said that our political room yeah i was i wash my body i don't don't wash my hair well and i think it's totally fine and you know i'm i'm used to that sort of thing and so again my circle of friends i know where at home it's pretty normal for not having a shower every day or not washing your hair every day but yeah i think there's a lot of that factor that comes out with a lot of people how would you address that well i think if you think it honestly takes knowing someone actually personal hygiene standards in america are just really too much and i did grow up with a pretty european family and so it wasn't something wasn't normal for us to shower every day so i think also a lot of it has to do with culture but if you hair i mean i use dry shampoo which really just gives it lift makes makes the oil disappear it's not really a cleaning but my hair doesn't look greasy or oily and it's not like it smells it doesn't doesn't smell and if i smell then i take a shower but if i don't then i don't and so it's just kind of knowing your body chemistry and eventually after you detox from a lot of the chemical products because what's in still many of them makes you need to wash your hair or it makes you need to keep doing something it's like part of it so once you detox you find that you don't really need to as often yeah way gree i personally have found that you can have the break through this barrier and then once you're there it's it's really easy and yeah i mean there's definitely a need for hygiene but i think we do go a bit overboard in our culture and yeah maybe european it's a little more lenient because they've lived so closely together first i've been on the tram in paris before and trust me most people have not shared in a really long time with outlook and you get used to that so yeah so i think you know there's a lot of things with zero waste that involve a little bit of a factor but you know we can compost we can deal with that we can garden we can get dirty and that's totally fine so and i think and i think something else that's really important because what's really really important me is going back to how we used to do things like how my grandparents lived to my great grandparents live and that's a really really driving factor in my journey and i showered once a week and that wasn't weird like so many of the things that we're doing is exactly how they used to do it we've just been convinced because people want to sell products how it's supposed to be done when really it's just excess yeah exxon yeah it is it is very common to see that a lot of the efforts were making now in zero waste are just to get back to where we were viewed as a parabola like because we were here and they were at the top and now we're on the way back down back to where we used to be i always call it a problem because that's a really fun you can check me out on my blog at goings euro waste dot com it's full of d i y products seasonal recipes and organic cleaning products and just tips and tricks for living as you're always lifestyle or you can follow me et back i'm not it for everybody but if it's something you find you you use then there you go there we go i am also i have much less hair than you do so the the it washing it isn't such a big deal all right but i am i'm sorry we're going to just rush right into the next because i know that this one coming up here we've got one more interview and i know that you said that this was a really interesting yeah this was what i really enjoyed this was a woman named  tour and you know we just had some time afterwards and sat in a beautiful sunny park in berkeley and you might hear some sounds of the park in the back on and just talked about zero waste and really focused on that rethink aspect of zero waste and also a little bit a very cool project she's working on all right here we go this is travis barrington in beautiful sunny berkeley california as part of northern california zero waste week i've been out on a boat and doing lots of cool currently working on a comic book project about garbage and waste and then your future so what inspired this well a lot of things i am really interested in what happens to our garbage and trash and i i have found that it's kind of hard to figure it out sometimes i've been reading a lot of books about it and also just in terms of lifestyle i've always been like a scavenger and i've always loved to like find treasure in the trash so that's been a big influence into creating a fictional world about what made you think to do this as a comic book instead of some other form of well i always have like to draw and i've done that my whole life and i just feel like if we can inject a little bit of comedy in humor into a larger world messages people might be able to absorb them better instead of just telling people like cold hard facts about how dire everything is i think that it's not as inspiring for change that way yeah for sure it can be overwhelming in this current environment with a lot of bad news yeah so that's that's really interesting i don't know if you don't mind me saying i did notice on the tour today you were making some drawings about some of people had pig sties like at the edge of town or people who take this crap so i feel like that animal might figure into the world that i'm creating there's also like other animals that function as part of their waste system like raccoons and possums and rats crows and you know even now i've been hearing that different kinds of herons are starting to not be migration on this trying to stick around urban spaces so they can feed off of waste piles which is maybe sad but also interesting nuisance but the big concern for us is bears were we try to keep it away but that's really interesting to think of their part in the natural cycle as well and that's something i talk about a lot educating children and adults about natural cycles and the thing i always tell kids starting off is that everything in nature gets recycled and we should try to be more like that yeah yeah that's a that's a really good point i think that it's that's true that things do get recycled but then  think a lot of manmade things have a harder time getting a cycle like plastics you know like it just takes a long time or like there's not so far they can a natural way to reduce that even though maybe there are microbes that plastics now or there is that genetically modified things and that's an interesting avenue to think about too like how in the future it might be biological solutions to waste production yeah that actually is something i've read about with all the plastics being put into the ecosystem microbes are evolving and if there's an energy source life will adapt to use it and that is happening whether or not it's going to take place in the short of period to help us is one thing we have that's something i've definitely talked about a lot is the need for man made objects to more conform to the system rather than us to try to conform nature system to our needs so you said your book will be taking place in the future though is this a future that will have is the optimistic future know if i want to classify it as entirely this topic or utopian because there's some things in it that like i think maybe you'd be cool that there might be more a barter system or there might be more of a segregated society where there's people who like live in a sort of trashy area and then there's that very sanitary urban space and so in a way that's just hoping but i also think that it gives people a freedom at least people in this world that i'm writing about a freedom to like live the way they want to live or have you know separate affecting animal life so that's going to play a part in the story line to take action animals in and they think about things so much plastic in their environment so yeah yeah it's very interesting so the changes that you see happening i just had an idea and you mentioned something about the barter system and it's you said it would not really be just topic or utah pick and i just thought we see all these movies and things of the future where the conditions are different and they're always portrayed as being negative but if you take something like oh there's there's no currency anymore more people are in a barter system but if you portray it in your book as being a positive thing that people are happy to be doing that i think it maybe it get that like it's interesting to fantasize about that but i also feel like if we can give people hope falter negatives the nabi will generally be less pessimistic about the options that we have as a society and i also think the  mentioned earlier not when we were recording but i also i'm interested in taking the emphasis off of money making as they can go in life and have having it be more about like what work you're doing or how it's maybe a little more socialist but like how people's work can equate other people's work instead of like right now especially in the bay area there's like ten people who make like so much money per year versus like i've been working early childhood education which is a very legitimate important field but it's very low paying so there's like the value system that people place upon their work and i think and i'm interested in questioning that definitely questions that need to be asked and yeah i've been here a couple days now and it's really apparent those differences going around to different communities around the bay yeah there is a lot of money but it seems to be stalled up at the top but also to like you said maybe it doesn't have to come down to the bottom if we just shift our values of of what actually it means to be successful yeah and i think that that the idea of what is successful is also tied to like is it just took that you typically like what is your vision of success if your vision of success is like owning a fancy car and like living in a condo then like your idea might be different in my idea which would be like you know having a really healthy were and then or take not using plastic or you know other things that aren't about how much money you make but money does allow for freedom of movement and choices and it's not to say that economic disparity isn't important you know but i think that the more i learn about garbage and waste them i realize that it is an economic issue and that like the fact that we're standing plastics to china is because people there work for less money to  and they have less standards health standards like in their government so it's it's still like an economic thing and that's a roadblock we've run into and i've talked about before is that we always get told working at the  recycle this we are a cycle that we're going to do more and our message back is always it won't make us money so we can't do it and something to talk about before in the economic realities in the scheme of recycling up to yesterday is recycling as a service just like garbage you're paying somebody to take stuff away from you whether or not the recycling ends up generating money in the end shouldn't really be the issue the issue should be doing the right thing with that resource and i think like as modern armored and modern culture has become really reliant on the convenience of that and that convenience is like really most important like if it's not convenient then people don't want to do it and that means like sorting into different bins that's not really convenient like washing out your company spend like that stinking gross like it's not convenient and so they're basically paying for a convenience to just rid themselves of these packaging and discards that they don't want anyway and so i think that that's another thing to like think about is like well if you're in it if it's convenience and you're getting time right so that's like you're like if you're not spending time doing this and you have this extra time and so what do you do with that extra time and i think the answer for most people is like consuming media you know instead of like producing something of value so i think that it's interesting to think about what is getting freed up with our convenient products and then what we're using with that extra freedom that we get that that's a very very interesting way of working and i definitely agree it's been something that's come up before  the convenience and what you do that extra time and i guess when i was the news that how you pay or for that convenience and if you pay for they can reince up front or if you pay for it at the end of your use with a thing when you take it apart or or i think you can fix something invest your time into it and then have an object and it cost you less to have that object but then cost us money but it cost you time to fix it but then you also get the satisfaction of having worked on it of making a table or fixing an old pair of jeans or whatever yeah and i think you're mentioning that in vancouver that they're having something about like the producers of products have to end up paying for their end of life recycling right there's like a responsibility and i think that i don't know how much of that's happening down here but i think that's a really important thing too is that like the companies are making profits off of the convenience to enough of that one time packaging and i think that that's important to like have them be responsible for the end of life  yeah that's something that's kind of a hotly debated in some circles them the idea of producer responsibility is something that we find is very valuable idea in its practice and execution with a lot of our programs in b c it doesn't always work they they don't agree to pay early could mean it doesn't work like how is it will they do agree to pay and that does get used to recycle the product but a lot of those products are things like electronics where recycling it means getting the valuable metal out and the rest of it's garbage so one of the goals of the producers sponsibility isn't just to recycle it but it's to effect that effect the producer to produce a product that's less less resources to make is more repairable so it lasts longer is more durable big cetera and that's something that we are really happening and i thought of this the other day here is that in b c we have these programs but how can they really affect a producer when b c is a very small market there's less people in all v c than there is in the bay area so if some place like a when you were to adopt a program like that they might have more leverage in making the the shift of disposal go upstream to the manufacture yeah i like a big company who's doing that but i just imagine that like the feedback loop takes a while for you to give them feedback and say ok you know it's costing you money to deal with these products and then for them to go to like another section of the company that's designing things and then it also reminds me of like i've seen kind of a bigger fad in like buying for life you know things that last like a way that you can send in return and that's like definitely a bigger investment up front but it's it's also it's like we're kind of addicted to consumerism too like it's like the more things you have equal it's like the better life and that's you know an advertising thing and it's a hierarchical class issue as well yeah yeah yeah i feel like a small town person when i hear especially when i'm riding the trains and going through their stations there's so many outlets cleansing that i i'm not used to it i mean i feel like i see a lot of advertising is my idea of a life as it is but then coming here i'm not trying to put down the area of the city it's just the reality of when you are spending time in a population center the ads just get ratcheted up ten times and it's it's overwhelming for all these things they didn't even know existed have full page ads in buses driving by and i don't even know there's ads for apps i don't even know what they're for what they do i've never even heard of them i'm not  person by any sense but i feel like i am aware of things it's making me nuts i also feel a bit of pride that i don't know what i've been reading about the history of garbage this one book waste and want to take the social history of trash and i was just reading about like the first time i think it was in the thirty's that kotex introduced extended terry napkins to women and the like and i mean it was super popular because women were just using rags and washing them out and they were like yeah this is super convenient and they also were like equating cleanliness with disposal so it was like you'll be a cleaner person if you use this product and it was really appealing to this sense of make who are you and like what kind of person do you want to be sure to be like a dirty lady who washes her body bags or do you want to be this person who's like i'm just going to put that in the trash not think about anymore and i think it's interesting because i've seen kind of going back to that recently about reusable you know products for women it's like that but i think that's i just think it's really interesting like that that has become so imbedded in our consciousness that like when it first started it was like a new thing for you to be like what kind of person do i want to be and now it's like we've all grown up with so much advertising that it's hard to differentiate like your own thoughts versus what you know standards have been placed there yeah yeah that's such an interesting  example of a very specific product and scenario but it's so easy to see that attitude applied to so many other products just like a water bottle or something like do you want to reuse your water bowl it's mel's i don't want to wash it do you want to or were  trying always do you want to i don't want to clean up my compost bin i'm going to put it in a compostable bag that's only kind of composable and throw it away and then i don't want to touch that stuff that's yeah well that's was the book called again it's called waste and want i think changed it to them via and so the character kind of came to me and said and has been with me for years and i finally in the comment put it on paper and it's targeted towards mostly adults young young adults with there being a chance you could send me a copy when it's done well ok well thanks yeah yeah i don't thanks for talking to me you're my first person to interview on here so i'm hoping to bring back a few stories to share with everybody thanks very much well you did bring back some stories travis thank you so much and i know we're a little bit over time here so we will be nice and quick it is the fun drive and stuff so yeah people please be be calling in be donating on the internet keeping this keeping this kind of awesome local and international like the local perspective on these kinds of issues yet local and international this is the show sustainability so if you want this show to be sustainable it needs some donations to keep it going so i could not have put it better myself we will see you changes we'll be back next week on chile one a one point seven thank you so much for listening everybody thank you