This is the official website of the Zero Waste Institute, a non-profit corporation with headquarters in Sebastopol California. ZWI is the only Zero Waste organization with a carefully thought out set of principles and a consistent approach to resource problems.

Zero Waste is a THIRD GENERATION PRINCIPLE

First generation (immediate satisfaction)........ DISCARD and DUMPS = GARBAGE
Second generation (short term)....... POST-DISCARD REUSE = RECYCLING
Third generation (long term)........ EXPLICIT DESIGN FOR REUSE = ZERO WASTE
Zero Waste cannot be achieved with more recycling. Only the intelligent redesign of industrial and commercial practices to eliminate discard holds out the promise of a Zero Waste society.
In addition, Zero Waste turns out to be an environmental THEORY OF EVERYTHING! You know, the sort of thing Einstein searched for all his life. All this in a new theory of manufacturing, distributing and using commodities.
I hear you asking: how can a theory of eliminating discard be a theory that covers everything environmental? It's simple. The easy creation and discard of waste is so pervasive in our culture that it has created endless problems wherever you turn. The one theme that creates (almost) every problem which threatens our planet is the easy generation of waste (and its universal sister - inefficiency). One problem after another comes down to that.
After all, what is causing climate change if not the easy generation of waste carbon dioxide? Zero Waste says to find a use for every byproduct before starting any process. That would put coal out of consideration immediately. Burning oil might have snuck thru if there was little enough of it for nature to absorb some extra carbon dioxide. If still more carbon dioxide was generated, research could have been directed, as it finally is now, to absorption into forests or algae or other sinks.
Wasteful transportation? Fragmentation of living space into suburbs and commercial space into malls? All the wasting, thru gross inefficiency of fuel use.
Chemical pollution of land and waterways? The waste of chemical byproducts "because we can". What we should be doing instead is designing chemical processes to make perpetual use of all chemical products.
Nuclear waste? There is actually no such thing. There is only a process which attempts to express as a waste what is actually a usable byproduct if the research were done to find uses for the plutonium and other isotopes.
Loss of fisheries? The wasteful use of the world's biota, removing product faster than nature can replace it.
It's hard to find a single environmental problem that is not expressible as the inefficient usage or outright wasting of some natural resource. That even seems to be what "environmental" means, when you come right down to it. Learn more
[ Are you still not convinced? Still wedded to recycling? Take this test. ]

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.- Buckminster Fuller
( Damn! How did he know so much back then? )
To be realistic, you must demand the impossible. - unknown
We have to get better at believing the impossible - Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine.
In the future ... a shoe will be a chip with heels, a car is a chip with wheels - basically most of the cost of manufacturing a car is in the embedded intelligence and electronics and not the materials - Kevin Kelly (supra) in his TED video
When you are trapped in one paradigm, the next paradigm seems like science-fiction. John Markoff, technology writer, author of What the Dormouse Said, in a book interview. Paraphrasing from writings of Thomas Kuhn.
... Mr. Forstmann ... jumps between thoughts, examples and anecdotes. One such aside is about Warren Buffett and the rule of the three "I"s.
"Buffett once told me there are three 'I's in every cycle. The 'innovator,' that's the first 'I.' After the innovator comes the 'imitator.' And after the imitator in the cycle comes the idiot. Which makes way for an innovator again." So when Mr. Forstmann says we're at the end of an era, it's another way of saying that he's afraid that the idiots have made their entrance.
"We're in the third 'I' for sure," he interjects an hour after first introducing the "rule." "And that always leads to something. Innovators don't just show up. Some disaster takes place because of the idiots, and then an innovator says, oh, look at this, I can do this, that or the other thing." That disaster is now.
(from a conversation, reported in the Wall Street Journal, about the current credit crisis). It seems to apply to many different kinds of idiocy. See the original .)
Who are we? We are a polluting, wasteful, aggressive species with a few nice things thrown in - Louise Leakey, archeologist and discoverer of Homo Erectus (in TED presentation)

When someone tells you that something is impossible, say to that person, you are confusing impossibility with your not knowing how to get it done. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, in a Ted presentation on predicting the future.

Help us to spread the word that there is a better way than recycling to conserve resources.

Here is the most exciting information you will find anywhere on the subject of how to build a whole new paradigm for conserving resources. Just look thru our website, and learn how Zero Waste is a special kind of theory. Learn how it supplants and advances the theories of recycling. Read more

Are you curious what Zero Waste would mean in practice? Since ZW means a redesigning, don't be surprised to learn that a ZW project can mean a project to redesign a product.

There are many stories and events that form the history and illumination of the concepts of ZW. Here is some interesting background reading. Read stories.

Zero Waste is an international movement and growing more so. Learn more about ZW outside the United States and also what it means to other people worldwide. And a few from inside the USA, just for balance. People.

Click the star to check out the new film Eleventh Hour

As you surf this website, you may miss an important feature which is implicit in all the writings. We are not trying to scare you to death about anything. We are searching for positive approaches to the problems that surround us. Do you realize how unusual this is?
Ludwig Von Mises, an economist who died in 1973, had this to say about running a negative campaign:
"An ‘anti-something’ movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program that they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be."
Based on that philosophy, we are not simply railing against garbage dumping, even though we know it is about the dumbest idea around. Instead, we treat it as irrelevant and move on to a fully developed theory of Zero Waste design.
Many of the environmental groups build their whole approach around scaring their members. Take a Toxic Tour. They will tell you how dangerous your drinking water, air and food are. They will tell you that carcinogens are in every drop of water and every spoonful of soil, as well as in every cell of your body. They warn us that it is a flaming injustice to build dumps near minority neighborhoods. We can watch dozens of videos to show how our wastes create hazards in China or Africa. You would think, listening to them, that chemicals and plastics were invented only to kill and injure and have no beneficial uses.
Somehow the only remedies they embrace are more government regulation or enforcement. They studiously avoid putting forward any ideas for changing the motivations that lead to these problems or for redesigning products or social structures that lead to dangerous practices. The trigger word "toxic" is employed shamelessly. Yes, there are terrible problems and injustices and chemicals can be dangerous. But government regulation is an extremely blunt tool. It can be co-opted by anyone with power or money and usually is. On this website we are seeking brilliant ideas that can lead to effective solutions.

The various colorful designs found on this website are from Paul Palmer's personal collection of Turkish greeting cards. An exception is the Ouroboros, an ancient design for a dragon eating its own tail, which was the logo of Zero Waste Systems Inc., Paul Palmer's company for the reclamation of industrial chemical byproducts.