Shannelle Chua | Kayang Zero Waste : Zero waste is possible

 
Zero waste is the philosophy that any items produced are able to be reused or recycled, thus leading towards zero waste. And in the past few years, the zero waste lifestyle movement in the Philippines has grown from being supported by small local brands to being supported by large corporations as well. While it is helpful for awareness that mainstream businesses are starting to visibly display more eco-friendly options, awareness without proper education by itself could be detrimental to the movement. Some viral tweets have documented well-meaning yet misinformed actions to be zero waste. Furthermore, examining the social media responses to items being marketed under the guise of being environmentally-friendly revealed there tended to be an overwhelmingly positive response. These activities prompted my further study of local zero waste businesses and communities.
The conclusion that I came to was that smaller and more independent brands tended to educate their followers on social media, while larger businesses did not. The response and engagement from the followers on these larger brands, then, tend to lack critical thinking; as previously mentioned, people did not think deeper into the contradiction of products being unnecessarily manufactured and then marketed as “environmentally friendly.” And in interviews that I conducted, it was revealed that the fact that businesses being responsible for driving awareness had led to some people mistakenly thinking that owning certain items were conflated to be zero waste. One interviewee, when asked if he was interested in zero waste, asked for clarification if that meant reusable straws; when pushed further, he explained that owned one, but he never used it. The project was created in response to these different factors.
The website’s overarching theme is to say that zero waste is possible without buying items. As the website is geared towards addressing Filipinos specifically, the home page starts with some explanation of my background and why I care, meant to establish some relatability to my audience. Building off of that first page, the second page makes it clear that it is possible to be zero waste just by using what you already own, and I illustrate this through examples from my own experiences. The third page, then, is a game meant to not only provide people with concrete zero waste examples, but to also push people to apply those examples. The final page is a compilation of tangentially-related resources and communities for those who would like to educate themselves further. All the main pages are focused on providing examples of not only how zero waste is possible, but how it’s possible without buying items.
An earlier iteration of the project was meant to be a directory of zero-waste products, but after compiling a variety of items, it became clear that a lot of items were economically out of reach, exceeding well past the ₱537 minimum wage in Metro Manila. In consideration of the criticisms about the zero waste lifestyle being accessible only to the privileged, corroborated by how the issue of cost also appeared in interviews, the project shifted to its current focus.
Due to the very personal approach of the current version of the project, the natural extension of the project would be to develop it into a blog if I were to work on it further. As the website was personally built using HTML and CSS, as well as a Content Management System, I would be capable of building any additional functionality and easily adjusting the content.