
Photo: Washington Post video caption

Photo: Washington Post video caption
But he did make a few exceptions. “I couldn’t always control other people’s behavior, so junk mail wouldn’t count as my own recycling. I wasn’t going to be a bore and instruct a dinner-party host on how to reduce trash. And if someone gave me a gift – a token offered from the heart – I accepted it.” He also separated his requirements of single-use materials at his lab, from his personal habits at home. Although Karwat didn’t give up toilet paper initially, five months into the experiment he realised that he’d have to, in order to be truly trash-free. And for him, that was the biggest challenge – he admitted that it was unreasonable to give up at the beginning. But eventually managed to get over the ‘gross factor’. “Deep-rooted in culture’s psyche is its obsessiveness with its sanitary ways, toilet paper, and paper products chief among them,” he wrote on his blog when he made the decision to stop using toilet paper. “The ecological impacts of our standards of sanitation? Hmm. And so a few months ago, I gave up toilet paper. That’s right. No ‘recycled’ toilet paper, no toilet paper whatsoever. I use a little water bottle, and… my… hand. And take it easy, I still use soap.” “It works, and it feels much better than wiping your a** with a piece of paper.”
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Giving up on so many things also meant that Karwat’s social life took a beating. Bringing his own glass to parties to avoid using paper cups wasn’t cool, but in the end, he thought it was all worth it because he was able to prove that people could follow sustainable lifestyles if they choose to. And when he looks at the big picture, he doesn’t believe his life really changed all that much. “In many ways, though, my life didn’t change much,” he wrote. “I had grown up in a humble setting in India, where I was accustomed to consuming as little as possible. I was a member of the People’s Food Co-op in Ann Arbor, where I bought my produce unpackaged. I didn’t even have to become a recluse. Rather, my quality of life improved. I learned to be more present in my choices, and I learned what is important to me, regardless of what others think.” Karwat believes that if he could live a trash-free lifestyle, anyone can. And he says more people should give it a try, to be able to make a dent in America’s $52 billion trash industry that produces 250 million tons of trash every year. “We don’t have to go back in time to heed environmental boundaries,” he said. “We just have to be creative. What began as a one-year experiment ultimately lasted two-and-a-half years, the rest of my time in Ann Arbor.”
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
But Karwat says he doesn’t judge people who can’t follow in his footsteps. “Others don’t have the flexibility or means for this kind of activism,” he wrote. “Or they may simply have more immediate concerns. Consumption is so convenient that it is truly invisible and routine. I tried my best not to be sanctimonious to people less committed than I.” Karwat himself has found it difficult to replicate his trash-free lifestyle since he moved from Ann Arbor to Washington. “Standing in my kitchen in Washington, I think about the waste I generate now, in a city that doesn’t have the same infrastructure as Ann Arbor has,” he said. “It has been more than six weeks since I moved here, but my one-and-a-half-gallon trash and recycling bins are both full already.” “It’s time for me to go to the chute to send these materials to a landfill and a reprocessing facility. It’s not like I’m a profligate consumer today, but I can’t say it doesn’t hurt.”