Ethics on Earth©

One day after March 30 the International Day of Zero Waste. I didn’t plan to write about it. I didn’t want to be sharing one more post, one more hashtag, following the trend. No.

Well, here comes today and I found myself thinking about something much smaller.

This morning, I threw something away. Just packaging, nothing important, nothing unusual. For a moment, I paused. It will outlive what it once protected.
It took seconds to use… but it may remain for decades.
There was something unsettling in that realization.
Not dramatic, not overwhelming, just quiet.

I am thinking and overthinking a lot recently…

A kind of discomfort that lingers when we notice what we usually ignore.
In a world shaped by production and consume, these moments are easy to overlook.

Waste feels normal. Expected. Almost invisible. But perhaps that is precisely the problem. Because waste is not only what we throw away.

It is also what we stop seeing.

It marks a distance from the consequences of our actions, from the limits of the world we inhabit, from the responsibility we carry within it…

I find myself returning, again, to Hans Jonas and the idea that our actions extend far beyond us.

What we discard does not disappear. It remains somewhere, somehow already into the future.

And still, we move through our days as if nothing truly accumulates. As if the world could endlessly absorb what we no longer want.
Maybe this is the deeper illusion, not just excess, but distance.
A distance between action and awareness.
Between use and consequence.
Between living… and noticing how we live.
Maybe the question is no longer only how we deal with waste.
It is quieter than that. More unsettling.
Why do we create so much of it?
And what does that say about the kind of life we are trying to build?
If living well means having more, then perhaps waste is inevitable.
But if living well means something else, something closer to balance, to care, to enough, then waste begins to feel out of place.

So maybe zero waste does not begin with systems or policies. Maybe it begins with attention and with a small reflection if this could have been otherwise?