It’s a catchy phrase: the 5 R’s of zero waste. The words themselves also roll off the tongue: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot. I recently shared book notes from my reading of Bea Johnson’s Zero Waste Home, that includes this concept and I wanted to do a deeper dive through the layers.

When I was immersing myself into the zero waste movement a few years ago, I did that mostly through YouTube videos and blogs. Through that learning I heard so much about this book as a catalyst for the zero waste movement. It was time I read it to see where the modern idea of zero waste started entering the mainstream.