Zero Waste Home: A Comprehensive Guide to Streamlining Your Lifestyle and Minimizing Waste

Tahoe pow chaser: I'm not zero waste (yet) but I'm making huge improvements. I wish I had this book years ago. There are lots of great ideas peppered throughout this book and I think it would benefit everyone to read it. If nothing else, it will bring awareness to the areas of your life where you can really cut back on waste the most.

United States on Jul 27, 2023

Annamarie: Love the easy way this book is written - gives you the facts about how we’re messing up the planet and the doable steps we can all take from tiny baby changes to larger ones So instead of feeling like we can’t ever make a difference we are empowered to know that whatever we can personally manage is a step in the right direction

United Kingdom on Feb 23, 2023

Kindle Customer: I found this book interesting concerning the ideas that Bea promotes, and full of useful hints and tips. However, I felt some concepts were a little counter productive in practical and zero waste terms.
How far one can implement some of it depends on many variables, such as geographical location, climate, access to bulk buying and adequate storage for such items, size of household (single/ family) and even age limitations, definitely influence the practicalities.
I was also puzzled as to why a book titled "Zero waste home" appeared to be concerned about decluttering and reducing what one might possess. To me this is irrelevant to the subject of zero waste and environmental issues.
This book is thought provoking, and I found that for me personally, it helped me to realise that I would not be implementing quite such a radical approach to living! I care very much about environmental issues, and detest the sort of waste that we encounter nowadays especially with plastics and single use items, and will continue to live these values and encourage others likewise, and will work on reducing as much waste and pollution as possible, but perhaps with a gentler approach!

United Kingdom on Jan 11, 2021

Kindle Customer: Covers just about anything and everything you could possibly need to know about the zero waste lifestyle. This book was highly recommended by a couple YouTubers I watch & now I can see why:)

Canada on Jan 06, 2021

senbonzakura: I've always been interested in ways of being less wasteful and helping the environment, but I've never really done enough or made a real effort to get started. This book collects everything together into quite a comprehensive guide to how you can reduce waste and become more environmentally conscious. It's full of a lot of good information that really helps you to get started or go a bit deeper on your journey.

However, as others have mentioned, there are provisos. For a start, Bea is a bit of a yummy mummy character with a lot of time on her hands. She doesn't work, so she clearly has time to char almonds to make eyeliner, craft things out of felt and make her own jam. Obviously most of us with 9-5 jobs do not. That's not to say you can't implement some of the ideas though - just probably not many of us are going to switch to moss for toilet paper, cocoa for blush and vinegar for conditioner. She does seem to take things to rather an extreme: maximising right turns to save fuel (!), making all her own 'makeup' from arrowroot powder and suchlike, and making a fuss about the tiny bit of paper on the back of a stamp. This doesn't really resonate with most people. We could all...

United Kingdom on Feb 01, 2017

Ideaphoriana: Zero Waste Home is an extreme approach toward reducing your waste and simplifying your life. How extreme? Imagine a family of four generating only a quart of garbage — every year.

Obviously, getting to this level of waste reduction takes us far beyond simple decluttering, and as the subtitle implies, the Zero Waste Home approach places its primary emphasis on the intake side of your stuff. Although Johnson notes early on that the book “will encourage you to declutter,” her eyes are clearly on bigger prizes: “a better environment” and “a better you” [Kindle location 170]. The path for doing this is by “understanding the effect of our purchasing power on the environment and acting accordingly” [192]. In this context, decluttering is about not just getting rid of stuff, but learning how to refrain from collecting stuff in the first place. While Zero Waste Home does not have a method for decluttering, Johnson did have a motto which she and her family applied when they downsized to a much smaller house: “What we did not truly use, need, and love had to go” [85]. Using this motto, the author’s family reportedly got rid of 80 percent of their belongings...

United States on Nov 27, 2015

BlondeRunner: I'm a 26 year old single mother of a four year old. I live in VA. I work full time and go to school.

I am enjoying reading the reviews people are posting either posting a wealth of excuses or poking holes in every single thing that isn't eco friendly: "LOOK THEY HAVE VINYL FLOORING!!!" There is always going to be someone critiquing what they themselves aren't even doing. Heck our entire nation does it during American Idol.

Read it with an open mind and don't try to do everything at once. I started reading her blog in 2011. Yes, I still bought the book (e-reader version) because instead of like a blog where the entries are written when inspiration strikes this book is more organized and does offer more info.

When I tried this stuff I did not hold myself to all of her standards and I knew that these ideas would never take over in my home. When I got rid of all my excess in 2011 I made 2,500$ by selling it off on Amazon and got a notable tax deduction for all the donations. I also felt like I could breath.

When I bought flour sack clothes I did with the intention of saving "some money" but I "knew" we'd always need paper towels. The joke was on me since it...

United States on Nov 23, 2013

L. Monie: I began this book with an open mind, and at first I thought that what the author had undertaken was pretty impressive. And let's be fair, it is impressive. She has thrown a tremendous amount of energy, time and imagination into figuring out how to reduce (potential) waste from entering her home. She outlines how she went about it, and she goes into quite a lot of detail. If you want a zero waste home, this is the book for you.

I had several problems with the book:

The first problem is that as a UK reader, it's difficult to put most of this into practice, because we simply don't have the bulk shopping opportunities here that there clearly are in the US.

My second issue is that despite the undoubtedly admirable nature of the efforts made by the author to reduce waste in her orbit, one can't help thinking that someone with this much creative energy is wasted in a single domestic setting. I would have preferred to read her story about how she designed and manufactured an eco-effective product of the type described in 'Cradle to Cradle' one of the books that she says was an inspiration to her. The impact of her efforts, and the efforts that she's exhorting others...

United Kingdom on Aug 12, 2013