The Zero Waste Countdown Podcast

Star of the television show Free Ride on the Discovery Channel, Rob Greenfield, joins the Countdown to talk about his journey from South America, his bike ride across the United States, his book Dude Making A Difference, and his philosophy on consumption. 

Rachel Revoy joins the Countdown for her third episode as we talk about Christmas trees, Christmas travel, and even Christmas food. Warning: we talk a little bit about meat! Not that much though. We also talk about the commercial from Iceland that was banned for being "too political", because it shows how destructive palm oil can be.

Music Credits:

“Christmas Rap” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Rachel Revoy from Quinte Waste Solutions joins us again to speak about her own personal countdown to zero waste from a holiday perspective!

Join the countdown as we talk about zero waste and low waste options for Christmas this season, including everything from wrapping paper to flying over the holidays.

Stay tuned for an upcoming part two episode next week. 

Music Credits:

“Christmas Rap” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Meet Shane Price, the founder and CEO of Green Circle Salons, and find out how this Canadian from Toronto has changed the way American, and Canadian, salons get rid of their trash.

Did you know that our hair can be used to make absorbent pads that can clean up oil spills?

That's a much better end of life for hair, rather than ending up buried in plastic garbage bags underneath our soil, in landfills, emitting methane into our atmosphere and contributing to global warming for what could possibly go on for centuries.

Not only does Green Circle Salons collect hair and divert it from landfill, they also collect leftover hair dye chemicals and divert them from going down the sink and into our waterways. They're also working with Virginia Tech to develop some exciting new initiatives.

Kyle Calian founded the Regeneration Magazine, a collection of environmental stories and interviews with climate leaders and entrepreneurs who are making positive, sustainable change.

The  magazine is biannually available in digital or print, and Issue No. 4 of The Regeneration Magazine will be published this winter and will feature green energy and politics.

https://theregenerationmag.com/

Kristin Lawless (previously published as Kristin Wartman) is a Certified Nutrition Educator, an author, and an independent journalist focusing on the intersections of food, health, politics, and culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Newsweek, VICE, Huffington Post, and Civil Eats, as well as in academic journals such as The Black Scholar, Critical Quarterly, and The New Labor Forum. 

Her new book is called Formerly Known As Food: How The Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture. Throughout human history women have played a strong role in providing food for their families but today people typically rely on giant corporations to feed themselves - and those corporations could be putting profit over our health. Food has changed over the past 100 years and nutritional content has deteriorated due to industrial farming. Thousands of chemicals have been added to our diets from pesticides to packaging. We simply no longer know what we’re eating but there is strong evidence that it's changing our bodies and even our genes. 

Kristin Lawless

CNN calls her the mother of the zero waste lifestyle movement and The New York Times calls her the priestess of waste free living. Her book Zero Waste Home has been printed in over 20 different languages, she's spoken in 55 different countries, and her family of four only produces one jar of trash per year. 

Join the ZWC as we find out what Bea's been up to since her book was published and learn a few zero waste tips on traveling and how to refuse items we simply don't need. 

Matt Wilkins is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt's Center for Science Outreach who works as the Resident Scientist at Head Magnet Middle School, developing and teaching STEM curriculum. He collaborates with science, math, English, social studies, and Spanish teachers to build rigorous, engaging, interdisciplinary lessons that help students master abstract concepts, become more curious, and develop critical thinking skills.

Matt's previous and ongoing research involves multimodal sexual selection, acoustic divergence, and speciation. For his PhD he studied barn swallows in North America, Europe, and Asia to quantify variation in feather ornaments and song resulting from different targets of sexual selection across populations. As a postdoc at the University of Nebraska he extended this work by developing a 'phenotype network' approach for visualizing and analyzing the functional evolution of sexual communication signals in barn swallows and Schizocosa wolf spiders.

On July 6, 2018, Matt's article called More Recycling Won't Solve Plastic Pollution:

Matt's Website

Scientific American Article

The Tennessee Bottle Bill Project

Host of The Zero Waste Countdown Laura Nash met up with revolutionary fashion designer Daniel Silverstein, better known as Zero Waste Daniel, at his design shop in Brooklyn.

Fast fashion is quickly causing our planet a lot of problems - it's using too much water, too much oil, too many petroleum-based dyes, dumping too much effluent into rivers, synthetic clothing causes trillions of microfibres to enter our aquatic systems, it's wrapped in too much plastic, and then the quality just isn't there so after a year or so of being worn, fast fashion is wrapped in plastic garbage bags and trucked away to landfill where it will sit for the next few centuries buried under our soil. How can we get away from this system?

Zero Waste Daniel is changing the way fashion looks and feels - his designs are inclusive, genderless, they come in all sizes, and they represent conscious forward thinking that's very much needed in today's world. Tune in as we learn all about off-cuts and how Daniel is removing millions of them from landfills and spreading a positive message around the world that fashion is about to change for the better.

Meet Linn Frisinger, co-founder and CEO of Swedish Stockings who joins Laura in episode 26 of the ZWC to talk all about her sustainable company.

Their high quality stockings are made from polyamide reclaimed from a big problem in our oceans - fish nets. 

Often called ghost nets, loose fishing nets tangle up and kill marine life and release microplastic into the ocean but Linn's company is reclaiming them and turning them into a durable and fashionable product that can be recycled after its use once customers opt into their return program when the stockings are all worn out. That means Swedish Stockings is sustainable and closed loop.

Laura tested out a few pairs and they are stronger and longer lasting than typical stockings that only get one or two uses before being sent to landfill for the next century and made from the oil and gas industry. 

Use coupon code zerowastecountdown to save 15% on their website. 

Swedish Stockings

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