By the founders of Wayste, a Zurich-based startup that offers delivery of organic, package-free food.
We know what you’re thinking. Here we go again, another group of ‘experts’ assuming they know all about Zero Waste starting to preach how bad everyone is behaving, while munching on their sandwich packaged in single-use plastic, wearing the clothes they didn’t get second-hand, waiting for the Diesel fueled Uber to take them home to their apartment where trash, PET and cardboard piles are waiting to be brought to the garbage containers. What a bunch of hypocrites.
If you’re new to this topic, let me say this: Nobody expects you to turn your life upside down from one moment to the next. We haven’t, so why should you? Behaviour and mindset changes take time, and the thing we need to focus on is not how much we’re improving, but that we’re improving at all.
We loved the reason behind the Zero Waste movement. If there’s no waste, there’s less damage to the planet. And that was something we could stand behind. But the biggest reason why only so few are switching to this new mindset is simple: It’s way too inconvenient to fit into the busy and hectic lives us average people live today.
There are so many things pulling us in 1001 different directions and changing our shopping behaviour by having to visit three different stores and think about bringing our own packaging to buy everything we need can be overwhelming.
Some facts about waste or why this topic is urgent
Being a rich country comes with its flaws. If you have money you spend money, and since most things we buy are new and at some point become useless it makes sense that we create a lot of waste.
Let’s draw a mental picture of how much waste we create, because probably the number 716 kg of waste per person per year (the highest in the world) in Switzerland doesn’t mean much to you.
We just visited one of the five garbage incineration facilities in Zurich where we saw what happens with our garbage. Imagine a hole in the form of a bathtub. Now make that bathtub 30 meters deep (that’s a 10 story building), 10 meters wide and 60 meters long (roughly speaking). Playing around in that massive bathtub is a crane that can carry 2 – 3 tonnes of trash; that’s like carrying 2 – 3 VW Golfs at the same time. The point is, the thing is huge.
Here comes the bomb: This bathtub that collects the trash of one fifth of the population of Zurich and a few towns around it fills up to the max every 10 days. Over the whole year, this facility burns around 230’000 tonnes of garbage, that’s 230’000 VW Golfs that are burning – get the picture?
Seeing this blew our minds and made it easier to understand how much waste (and lots of it is packaging waste) we’re all creating. But there’s hope!
What Wayste is about
We want Wayste to be the most convenient place to get all of the products you want, packaging-free. We believe in balance, so we’re about building a business that combines growth with sustainability.
Growth because we want to help as many people as possible buy local and organic products packaging-free. Our goal is to build a business that spans across countries and connects consumers everywhere to local, healthy and unpackaged products for their homes.
Sustainability because we don’t want to compromise nature for profits, as many companies do. Whatever we do, we always try to think in the long term. And in the long term the only thing that makes sense is to be ecologically sustainable. It will take time and a lot of work, but we believe it’s worth it. For us, and for the next generation.
Do you want to know more about Wayste? Visit there website here.