 First, I want to talk about the movement that is already underway. Our disposable culture is very pervasive, but businesses and the government are already taking that on and starting to dismantle that. And I think that we'll be able to make the changes that we need to make in the next ten years if we continue this momentum. But first, I think we need to stop talking about climate change. In the second part, I'm going to talk about some of the issues that come up with climate change. I think it's so politically polarizing and why it's a communications nightmare. And then I'm going to provide some specific ways if we reduce waste, then we can have an impact on climate change and these big global issues. Specifically, I'm going to talk about plastic pollution and the fast fashion of the impact our apparel has on the environment. And then I'm going to have some zero waste tips and hopefully have plenty of time for some questions and answers and I would love to hear your thoughts on what I'm saying. Maybe have a discussion. But before I start this, I want to tell you a little bit about who I am beyond my work with the examiner. I grew up in the Redonda Beach Torrance area of Southern California and it felt like I was always at the beach growing up. I had a fourth grade teacher, a SoCal surfer dude named Mr. Duncan and he took us down to the beach at least once a week to learn about marine biology, geology and that experience really instilled in me an appreciation for the environment. And it was actually in his class that I led my first advocacy campaign for a dolphin safe tuna and my mom likes to remind me that Bumblebee wrote me a letter back saying that their dolphin, their tuna practices were dolphin safe. So it was easy to become an environmentalist with this kind of background. I've been an environmental lobbyist in Washington DC. I was with the AmeriCorps program, I was planting native seeds and pulling invasive weeds on the side of the road in Oregon. I am an environmental attorney and practiced for several years at a law firm. And now as you know, I write for the examiner and several other publications. And I also organized for a nonprofit called Mothers Out Front. And being a mother is actually a huge part of my inspiration. This is my son, it was a couple years ago. He's four and I have a 16 month old daughter. And I was very proud that he was a compost man for Halloween because that's who he thought was a hero in San Francisco. And he really does get it at such an early age. He knows to ask for his apple juice without a straw. He, we get the chronicle delivered every morning, which I know is kind of sacrilege for an examiner writer to say. But it comes delivered in a plastic sleeve and he looked at it and he just shook his head and he said, Mom, why don't they know plastic is bad? And this is kind of where I want to start. My son and all of the kids that I'm seeing marched down Market Street last Friday. There was a huge student strike for climate change. The youth today are giving me incredible hope for the future because they just get it. They see where disposable culture is and they're already dismantling it in their head. So I think that today's youth, in addition to the movement that we're already seeing with governments and businesses, will really take us where we need to go. So I want to start with what we're already doing in San Francisco. We have the plastic bag band. We have a styrofoam band here. We have a plastic straw band. Thanks to some of the work that people in the audience did. Eva Holman back there. We have municipal compost and recycling program. I'm hoping that Supervisor Peskin will follow through with what he's promised us and introduce new legislation that would be further banned on disposable food where from to go that we get with takeout and delivery. At the state level, we also have a plastic bag band, a plastic straw band, a band on non-recyclable, non-compostable food packaging at state facilities. This is a picture of some of our assemblymen, Phil Ting, introducing his receipt ban. And some people might, most of the time when we get receipts, we don't really need them and we know the resources go into the receipts. Takes trees to make paper. But receipts are also made from thermal paper, which is coated with chemicals. And so I mean, this is good for our health and it's good for the environment. I'd really like to see this move forward. SB 54, which was introduced by our Senator Scott Wiener, along with some additional senators, is proposing a phase out of single-use plastics by 2030. So I would encourage you all to follow that and voice your support if possible. So there's things happening across the country and nationally. But I'm gonna skip past that for right now and just say that more than 60 countries are curbing plastic waste. We have plastic bag bands, styrofoam bands all over the world. And the European Parliament and the United Kingdom have made commitments to phase out single-use plastic. And of course, businesses. This is a list of all the businesses that, well, not all of them actually. I get so many press releases from businesses that are proposing that they're phasing out straws or plastic water bottles. And I think it's great. I wanna highlight it whenever possible. But we've seen incredible momentum. And down here at the bottom, I've included Trader Joe's. Trader Joe's plastic packaging is not good. And Greenpeace put together a change.org petition that I think got close to 100,000 signatures. In response to that petition, Trader Joe's has announced that it's going to start phasing out some of its plastic packaging, which is great. I think we need to really keep pushing businesses on this. I get into a lot of fights, and I've covered this in my column. The food delivery services like Postmates, Uber Eats. We get way too much plastic packaging with this. Plastic ramekins filled with coleslaw that we don't need. Plastic packages of ketchup and soya sauce. It would be really great if businesses caught on to the fact that we don't want this, we don't need this. And they can save money if they don't give it to us. But I think businesses are getting it, and I think we're moving in a good direction. This is kind of where I wanted to take this. So this is the cover of the National Geographic magazine from last June, Planet or Plastic Issue. And in that issue, the publisher vowed to stop putting their magazine in the plastic sleeve, and also to amplify the conversation around plastic pollution. And they have. It's really easy as a journalist as a communicator to talk about plastics, because the impacts are right there in front of you. And you can get these incredible images. This is a quote from President Donald Trump. As president, I will continue to do everything I can to stop other nations from making our oceans into their landfills. He was signing an amendment to the Marine Debris Act. He was providing more funding for ocean cleanup. This is not something that you normally hear from Trump. He's not normally known as an environmentalist. Definitely keep your eye on it. But what I'm saying is that I think that this is trash and talking trash is easier for governments and businesses and people of both parties to buy into than some of the other bigger environmental issues. And if you are an environmentalist, this is something that you should underline with a red pen and put a star bite. Because we don't see this that often. Most environmental issues are politically polarizing. After college, I got a job doing lobbying work for a nonprofit called the US Public Interest Research Group. And they sent me to Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana to get media attention, build coalitions, and sway lawmakers to protect the forests up in Alaska. Needless to say, it was very hard work and I didn't get a lot accomplished in the three weeks that they allotted me. But it goes to show that even trees, even protecting forests can be politically polarizing. And the experience really sparked in me a curiosity. Are there ways of communicating environmental issues that are more universal? And I think trash is one of them. Trash is very visible. This is a picture that Eva took on one of her beach cleanups of those plastic air pockets that come in a lot of our shipments. It's right there in front of us. We can see the trash cans overflowing. We can see the chip bag that's stuck on the storm drain. We saw that video, many of us saw that video, of pulling the plastic straw out of the turtle's nose. Governments and businesses can see these issues and say, okay, no more plastic straws, boom, crisis averted. It's much easier because it's personable, it's manageable, it's tangible. That's not climate change. Who here is scared about climate change? I am. And I think that's why we need to start treating it like the terrifying communications nightmare that it is. This is a comic that I see from a lot of climate deniers. It encapsulates I think a lot of the problems that come with climate change. First of all, what do we even call it? Do we call it global cooling, global warming, climate change, climate disruption, climate chaos? Most of the people, for most people, climate change is not personable. They haven't seen ice caps melting, they haven't seen starving polar bears. They haven't felt how much the temperatures changed dramatically over the past century. This of course is changing. I feel like most of the people last fall in here with the fires and paradise we put on our masks. And for us at that time, climate change felt very immediate. We felt like something was wrong with our environment. But a recent study said that only 22% of Americans think that climate change is dangerous now. Most people want to support climate change policies because they think that climate change will be dangerous in the future. And communicating what those dangers are in the future is really difficult. One of the things that I like about this comic is that it shows how confusing the science is for people. And this is something I bump up a lot of with as a journalist, as a writer. I was working with Dr. Irina Tazar, who is a, she studies melting sea ice in the Antarctic area. Actually, it's melting land ice in Antarctica. And what she was telling me was that it's really easy to measure what's going on on the top of the ice. You can't see how thick the ice is. You can't see the topography at the bottom. And so what she had to do is she had to develop a computer code using algorithm derived data to figure out how quickly Antarctic ice might melt. And she verified it. She validated it using historic ice melts in Greenland. And she determined she came up with a very accurate computer code. But she was very clear with me when I was writing my story that that data isn't total, doesn't paint a complete picture until you include other data from the ocean, from the Arctic, from the atmosphere. So all this is to say that while we know that climate change is happening, the science is really confusing. And that is really difficult as a journalist because I went back and forth with Dr. Taser so many times when I was writing that article because there were uncertainties and things I needed to communicate. But for a lot of journalists who don't have the luxury of time that I have, they're up against a deadline, they just get those articles out. And that muddles the conversation. And then it basically feeds into this climate denial rhetoric. And one more problem with climate change that I want to point out is that it's incredibly, progress on it is incredibly slow moving. So we're seeing this great momentum from the youth and from what we're seeing today with the Green New Deal and presidential candidates like Governor Inslee is making climate change a top priority. But then you have Senator Dianne Feinstein who's turning around and challenging all these youth activists after not doing anything for decades. And this can make you feel very overwhelmed because we got that report last October from the UN top scientists saying that we had to act by 2030 or face climate catastrophe. It's terrifying. I think that we'll be able to do it because we've done great things in the past. And when I was thinking about this, the first thing that kind of came to mind was the civil rights movement. We went from segregated schools to the Voting Rights Act for about 10 years with gay marriage. We went from Prop 8 in 2008 which made gay marriage illegal in California to the Supreme Court saying that gay marriage was legal in every state in 2015. And I know that the march to equal rights is far from over. But you just see some such incredible momentum. And I think that that's because these issues became personal to people. People started seeing images of Black protesters being brutalized on their TVs. Rave gays and lesbians stepped out of the closet. And I feel like that's what we need with the environmental movement. We need something that's personal. And for me, I think that that can be trash. Trash is tangible. We can see images like this. And this doesn't look sustainable. But this is actually the recycling facility that I had a picture that I took when I was touring Recology's recycling facility here in San Francisco. And so that's kind of where I think we need to start taking the conversation is that recycling isn't sustainable. When we talk about trash, we need to be talking about other things. I just want to tell you a little bit about the state of our recycling affairs. I don't know if anyone read on the front page of the New York Times over the weekend. There is a shorter article on what was going on with our recycling across the country. Philadelphia is now burning, incinerating its recycling. Memphis has abandoned it. There's places in Florida that are abandoning it. And the reason that they're doing this is because it's so expensive now to run these programs. China, which was historically one of the largest acceptors of our recycled waste, has pretty much banned importing recyclables into their country. And a lot of other Southeast Asian countries are kind of doing the same thing. India just made a similar announcement this month. I want to say that San Francisco, our proximity to the Pacific, it makes it easier for us to find markets that's not as expensive for us. So you should definitely keep recycling here. But recycling isn't the answer. And if we start talking about reducing, reusing, refusing plastic a little bit more, we automatically start saving energy. Just think about the energy that goes into recycling a plastic water bottle that you use for maybe 30 minutes. You put that water bottle into the blue bin. It gets picked up by a diesel power truck, taken to a sorting facility with all the energy that goes on there. Then it's picked up by another diesel power truck and put on a diesel power chip where it's taken to Asia. That's huge unnecessary energy if you just use your reusable water bottle. And so one of the things if we start changing the conversation around plastics, we can also start talking about the supply side of plastics and the incredible impact that that has on communities. This is a short video that was created by the Story of Stuff Project, which is a Bay Area nonprofit. And this is a teaser video for a longer video that they're releasing later this year on the story, the impact that supplying plastic to markets have. And this one specifically talks about the impact that it has on small communities. So I want to share it really quick, but hopefully I can get this working. My heart breaks for all the people in that Houston community. And I don't know if anyone's seen it in the news, but there is a fire at one of these chemical facilities in Deer Park happening right now. And that facility has been on fire since Sunday. The community around Deer Park is being exposed to this black smoke, these toxins in the air. And there's another shorter video, or maybe it's in the longer one coming up, but they mentioned that the special education departments and the schools around these refineries are significantly larger than average. Our addiction to plastic is causing health impacts to children, to families in these communities. This video can make you angry. It can make you sad. But remember that the solution is very simple. Use less plastic. Stop using plastic. You as a purchaser have an incredible amount of power to help communities. So it's just refuse, reuse, and reduce. Say no to the items you don't need. You don't need that plastic straw. You don't need that water bottle. You don't need that swag from the dentist's office or that extra beauty sample. Reuse, don't dispose. Get that reusable coffee thermos. Get that reusable water bottle. When there is a birthday party, use reusable dishes. Reusable drink dispenser instead of disposable. And reduce. Find alternatives to plastic. One of the simple things that I was doing was cooking. I wouldn't say it's simple because there's a luxury that comes with having the time to prepare meals after work. But finding alternatives to all that plastic packaging is a way to reduce the plastics. And also, it could come with health benefits. You know, this is a part of the presentation that I'm not as well versed on than some of the others. But I wanted to bring this up because a lot of the environmental groups, environmental working group, Center for Environmental Health have released studies about the toxins in our plastic packaging. And if you think about it, it makes sense. You know, these popcorn bags, the cardboard to go containers, the milk containers, ice cream containers, there's a reason why the paper isn't getting soggy. It's because it's coated with materials. Some of those materials, the health impacts are known and they're regulated to some degree. So Bispinol A is an example, BPA. That's an endocrine disruptor, which means that it mimics estrogen in our body and it could cause infertility reproductive problems. But there are a host of other potential chemicals that could be in these linings, in these packaging. And it's regulated in a very patchwork way. The FDA is pretty permissive. Some states and cities have more strict rules and then it's also, there's industry standards. But it's kind of all over the place and it makes me very uncomfortable as a consumer and as a mother. Oh, before I get there, I want to just change the conversation a little bit and start talking about fast fashion and the impacts that that has. So I don't know if anyone has seen the TV show, the Netflix show Tidying Up. But it's kind of one of my favorite shows. In the show, Marie Kondo, she's an organizing guru. And what she says is that all of the items in your house, your clothing, your books, your Christmas decorations, all of it should spark joy. And this method immediately spoke to me. I decided to con Marie, I think is how you say it, are clothes. This is a picture of all the hand-me-downs I have for my daughter. And seeing it on the bed, this is what she instructs. Put it all on your bed so you can see what you've consumed. That was enlightening just in itself. And then I folded it all nicely and put it away. And I did, my husband, I did the same and we did the same for my son's clothing. And it was, we live in a small 950 square foot condo here in San Francisco. So I didn't think that I would have a lot to get rid of. But there was a lot that we ended up giving away. And I realized that I had subconsciously bought into this idea of what I should be wearing. I wasn't really wearing clothes that I thought that made me feel confident and comfortable. I was wearing what I thought I needed to. I was wearing clothes that didn't bring me joy. And since I've gone through this process, I haven't felt the need to replace anything. I've really enjoyed opening my closet, seeing space, opening my drawer, seeing space. My only regret is that I wish I hadn't bought all of those clothes that didn't bring me joy to begin with because they have a significant impact on the environment. At every stage, this is just the supply process. There's resources that go into it. Cotton, some of the synthetic fibers come from oil wells. There's wool that comes from livestock. There's all that, you know, the plant crude oil and animal fibers, all are sent to facilities for yarn preparation. Then it's sent to for fabric preparation, leaching, dying and finishing. And then cutting and sewing fabric into apparel. According to a recent report, the apparel industry represents 6.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. I've actually seen this, this is a low number. I've seen it up to 10%. And most of this comes from the early stages. It comes from yarn prep, fabric prep, and bleaching and dying. And because the apparel industry is concentrated in Asia, a lot of the energy for this comes from fossil fuels, from hard coal. So according to this report, if we continue on the path that we're on, the apparel industry's impact will steadily rise over the next 15 years, reaching a projected 49% increase in climate change impact by 2030. So this could go up to 13%. And this is just the impact on energy. There's also water demand that goes into this. Cotton is a very thirsty crop, requires a lot of water. I've seen statistics, I have to look at my nose for this, that it's like 2,700 liters of water to make one cotton shirt, enough for one person to drink for two and a half years. There's also water that goes into bleaching and dying at all stages. There's water pollution. Textile mills generate one-fifth of the world's industrial wastewater. And that's, again, from the dying and bleaching. You can imagine the runoff from the cotton fields, from the livestock areas. Cotton requires a lot of pesticides and insecticides. I wish people talked about the land impact a little bit more. Growing all of that cotton, raising that livestock, drilling that oil, takes up a lot of land. And we really need to be preserving land as wild places for species. We have seen dramatic losses in insects, in birds, because we're just taking up too much of their habitat. The human impact does receive some news, but not enough. I saw that Oxfam recently released a study that delved into the lives of people living in Bangladesh and Vietnam who work in garment factories. Through the hundreds of interviews that they conducted, they found that almost all workers were being paid below a living wage and were struggling to feed themselves and their families. And all of these impacts occur before we even buy the clothes. After we purchase the clothes, or we have the tags, the paper, plastic, the labels, which is more dying, more fabric, the transportation costs, and everything that goes in with that, packaging. The plastic sleeves that it comes with, the plastic air bubbles, the cardboard, the bags that go into it, the dyes, the paper. I talked about receipts already. And even just swiping your visa or clicking on Amazon has an energy impact. Amazon and Visa and MasterCard, any kind of big data provider, has data centers, which are facilities where they store all their servers or routers. And these take up a lot of energy for heating and cooling, and they take up a lot of land. So then we get our clothes and we wear them for a little bit. At some point, we decide that we're done with them. It's time to dispose of them. At this point, I think that's when most people start thinking about the environmental impact of what they're wearing. I get a lot of questions from readers about what to do with their clothes when it's time to dispose of them. What I say is that if they're all wearable, try to give them to someone else. Give them to Goodwill, a consignment store. There's plenty of places that will take our clothes. If they're not at all wearable anymore, Recology does accept textiles, clothes, and shoes. You put them in a plastic bag, a clear one, not like they're in this picture. This is just a picture I got from Flickr, by the way. And tie it up, and put it in the blue bin, and they'll take care of it. But like I said, recycling should not be the answer. It's better if we don't buy into the fast fashion industry anyway. So these are some ways that we can unsubscribe from fast fashion. Only purchase items that bring us joy. Shop at used clothing and consignment stores. Wear the same item more often. There was actually a New Jersey teacher, a middle school teacher that I saw recently in the news. She wore the same hemp dress for 100 days in a row. And I think it was really cool, because she was teaching her class about the impacts of fashion. But she was also modeling for those young girls that you can look fashionable, and you can be clean and presentable, and wear the same thing more than once. Mending care for the clothes you have. Dry cleaners are a great place to take your clothes if they've been ripped. You can take them in there and just sew them up. And it's good for the local economy. And then when you purchase new clothes, support lines with ethical and sustainable business practices. So now I'm going to wind up the presentation and talk a little bit about my own personal experience with this, and provide some tips. This is something that I wish, it's a quote I wish I had read when I first started this process. I decided to go towards zero waste in 2017. It was my New Year's resolution. Donald Trump had just been elected, and I was looking for ways to feel empowered in the face of Donald Trump. And I went all in. I thought I had to make everything from scratch. I had to do just completely do upheaval in my life. And that's not where you should start. I have a friend. She runs a consulting business called The Joy of Zero Waste. And she has really been an amazing resource for me through this process. Because what she said is this experience should be joyful. You can start with the easy things, and you build up your skills. And it becomes a lot easier over time. And I will have to admit at this point that I'm not at zero waste. When my kids are in pain, I give them ibuprofen, which comes in a little plastic container with a plastic dropper. I don't always remember my reusable containers. I let my son trick or treat, even though those candies come in non-recyclable, mylar wrapping. But the empowerment I felt when I started this process is being sustained by joy. And I feel like I'm moving in a great direction. So now I'm going to provide some of my tips that I've learned along the way. The first one is prepare and plan. When we go grocery shopping, we put up a list on the refrigerator. And when we're out of things during the week, we just put it up on that list. At the end of the week, I do all my meal prep and I circle all the items that I can get from the bulk bin. We always go shopping at Rainbow Grocery because they have an amazing assortment of bulk bins there. And the items that I can get from the bulk bin, I put it into these reusable containers that I bring with me. And that's how we do grocery shopping. It saves me a lot of time because I just go grocery shopping once a week and we have everything that we need. It's the same prepare and plan when we go out to eat. I pack reusable straws for my kids because they're still too young really to drink from regular cups. We bring our own to-go containers. I really like the feeling of being organized when I go out. The second is practice. So Starbucks and Pete's in all coffee shops mostly. I have reusable mugs that you can get there. They do exist. The first time I went to Starbucks and asked for a for-here mug, I was uncomfortable because I'd never done this before. And I think I gave the woman a long explanation of what I needed. She just turned around, pulled a mug off the wall, dusted it off and put some coffee in it for me. And it was quite simple. So I'm just sharing this experience because it's a little bit uncomfortable when you start, but you get much better at it as you go along and then you get all these hacks. This is a, that will save you time. Eva went to, she was picking up some cream cheese over the weekend for a beach cleanup that she was putting together. And she brought her reusable container to the house of bagels and they filled it up with cream cheese for her. When you can take a reusable container to a pizza place and have them put pasta sauce in it or we can go to a Mexican restaurant and get tortillas wrapped in foil which is much easier to recycle. There's a lot of little hacks like this that you get as you start to practice a little bit more. The third is replaced. We rely a lot on just disposable goods in general, disposable razors, disposable pens, disposable juice boxes at birthday parties. It's always nice to replace those things with things that you can reuse again and again like a reusable razor, fill a pen up with ink again. Use these drink dispensers. I just got from the, that image is from the Pottery Barn catalog. That's not what my drink dispensers look like. But you can see how beautiful they could be. The fourth, this is my favorite part about, I guess trying to be zero waste is the community that you get. I'm part of a Facebook group called Buy Nothing SF Families and every Halloween they have a Halloween costume swap. So you don't have to go out and buy a costume for your one year old that they're going to use for a little bit, one day and you're never going to need again. And you know the impact that has on the environment. So there's this community of parents out there that do this swap and it's fantastic. And you get, you know, the more you're in this, the more you meet other parents who, and other people who support you on the journey. And you get to know the businesses that are around you because you're not buying everything off of Amazon. So I found a needle point store on Sacramento Street, which I never would have found before if I was just automatically buying things off of Amazon. So, you know, I would like to have a little bit of discussions and questions and answers, but I want to just leave with a notion. You know, the environmental movement and climate change and all of these big global problems are so terrifying and you feel so guilty and sad and angry all the time. And I don't think the environmental movement needs to be that way. I think that you can feel empowerment, feel joy, feel, you know, community, feel creative, you know, in finding new ways to reduce your waste. And I, and feel an appreciation of the world around you. And that is what environmentalism should be. It should just be appreciating the world around you. So I just want to, oh, I forgot to say, one other thing is waste is very Instagrammable. It's just the aesthetic of it. So I just want to say that I appreciate you guys for being here tonight. And I would love to answer sorting questions or just hear your thoughts on what I said. So thank you so much.