Review: "Year of No Garbage" by Eve Schaub

Year of No Garbage by Eve Schaub
Published April 2023 via Skyhorse
★★★

Most trash is, one way or another, plastic.

Most plastic, even if it can be recycled now, will eventually end up in a landfill...

...and plastic is everywhere.

When Schaub started her Year of No Garbage in 2020—following up on her Year of No Sugar and Year of No Clutter—she thought it would be pretty straightforward: shop less at big groceries and more at smaller stores; eschew plastic wrap; experiment with alternatives to mainstream toothpaste (since the tubes aren't recyclable) and with more sustainable period products. But she got more than she bargained for: not only did 2020 turn out to be...2020...but the deeper she dug into the recycling pile, the more she found that "it's recyclable" is not the solution one would hope. As the year wore on, Schaub's goal became less to reduce her unrecyclable trash to an amount that could be stored in a glass jar and more to figure out just where the (washed, sorted) plastic piling up in her kitchen would all end up.

This feels like a much more honest book than many of the no-trash journeys I've read about—because Schaub couldn't reduce her waste to a glass jar, not once she figured out what it does, and doesn't, mean for something to be "recyclable" or "compostable." It forces you to look at your grocery basket (plastic) and everything in it: plastic packaging, plastic stickers, plastic netting. Or to reach out and see what you can touch that has plastic: my computer and e-reader and the cables that connect them; the buttons on my cardigan; my synthetic shirt; a pen and earbuds and the cover of a notebook and wrappings on greeting cards and on a pack of tissues.

I did sort of lose steam around the halfway point, when it was clear that the problem was going to boil down to plastic plastic plastic and there wasn't a way to fix it, just to dig deeper into how big the problem is. (I can only imagine how much faster I would have run out of steam if I'd been actually living it rather than reading it!) Still, this ended up being a better fit for me than Year of No Sugar...and I'm curious to see how long Schaub's promise to her family that this was the last project will last.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.