Zero Waste with Grandma

After forty years in the same kitchen, my grandma’s potato peeler finally broke. It wasn’t a particularly interesting peeler — what kitchen utensil really is? — but it had a pastel yellow handle reminiscent of its 1975 glory days, and only one blade because the other had recently broken off.

My grandma had worked that potato peeler hard, because like any good German grandmother, she made a lot of potato salad. The peeler had skinned thousands of potatoes; potatoes that fed my great grandmother, my mom and uncle as teenagers, my brother and I, and my cousin’s kids. If all the potatoes peeled by that peeler were put into a single bowl, then five generations would have shared a potato salad.

The value that my grandma placed on that peeler wasn’t as sentimental as mine, because the value she places on anything is utilitarian. She will squeeze every ounce of usefulness from all of her possessions, and she will breathe a second life into anything that is no longer usable. My mother’s baby clothes are quilts, old bottles are vases, and shower caps cover leftovers in the kitchen.

If my grandma is queen of repurposing, then my grandfather is king. All the furniture in their home is made of scrap wood, stained with coffee grounds, artfully crafted and definitely sturdier than anything from Ikea. In his workshop, nuts and bolts from retired machinery are meticulously organized into old baby food jars. Handmade scrap-metal shelving houses old but cared-for tools from a shipyard career.

My grandparents epitomized reduce, reuse, and recycle before it was cool. They have always cycled organic matter between the garden, the table, and the compost pile. Their 8 x 8 backyard garden produces more vegetables than two old people can eat, so they give half of their broccoli, tomato, lettuce, bell pepper and herb harvest away to the neighbors. The compost pile sits next to the garden, five feet in diameter and piled high with lawn mowings and kitchen scraps.

My grandparents take responsibility for every item that comes into their possession and are mindful of excess, because excess is something that they never had. They grew up during the war, and the experience of scarcity embedded itself into their lifestyle. My mother, who grew up in the thoughtful abundance of a low-waste household, only adopted a handful of her parent’s low-waste habits because a lack of resources never became a motivating factor for her to use less.

And because of the even greater scarcity of scarcity among my generation, I grew up at the peak of throwaway culture. Plastic toys piled in the corners of my bedroom, and I packed cheaply made and priced clothes into my closet. I spent high school afternoons at the mall, drinking boba from plastic straws in plastic cups. All of it was excess, and I tossed all of it into the trash can when I didn’t want it anymore.

Certainly, I did not appreciate my grandparent’s lifestyle until the plastic pollution crisis rose to the top of my news feed and I began to recognize the excess in my life. As though I’d been near-sighted and finally put on a pair of glasses, the wide ranging consequences of my wasteful habits came into focus and I found myself considering where my things came from and where they went when they weren’t in my possession.

We should inherently be responsible for the things that we own and that come into our lives- most things are acquired by choice, after all. When you bring a thing into your life, you blindly conduct an orchestra of production. You say what raw materials should be dug from the earth, who should mix the chemicals to synthesize the components, and what should be created by who, where, and how fast.

How you get rid of the thing matters too, but our consumer culture conveniently hides the consequences of ownership. The “out of sight, out of mind” mentality gives us a false sense of responsibility when a thing that we don’t want anymore so much as ends up in a trashcan. As our landfills overflow, the oceans acidify, and as the toxic byproducts of our gluttonous consumerism come back to us in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breath, we as a species are forcibly becoming aware that trash cans don’t just make trash disappear.

In other words, our consumerist economic system is linear and thus adverse to the circular quality of life on earth. Certainly, the consequences of wastefulness will come back full circle, and we will either willingly or desperately relearn the zero-waste habits of our grandparents. When we add value to our possessions by caring for and fixing them, we deter the scarcity that will befall us if we don’t.