IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Elisah Pals (Zero Waste Netherlands)
Making a personal mission public
By: Bénine Buijze
Photo's: Elisah Pals
What’s sadder than walking through nature and finding heaps of plastic items, Styrofoam and other waste made by humans? It was the sight of a littered beach in Colombia that was supposed to be an idyllic paradise in 2018 that made Elisah Pals decide to take her personal journey public. She was already three years on her way to reducing her own ecological footprint when she took the initiative to start Zero Waste Netherlands: an organisation helping consumers, business owners and legislators to reduce waste production.
Elisah Pals is the frontwoman of Zero Waste Netherlands, but this was not an obvious step in her career. She was professionally trained as an occupational health psychologist and worked in the field of keeping people happy and healthy in their workplace. She stumbled upon the zero waste lifestyle whilst trying to achieve something else. “I was trying to improve my health and wanted to have less additives in my food.” This meant eating fewer processed foods and buying more whole foods: the way she did her groceries changed. “I accidentally produced half of the waste compared to before and that happened without even thinking about it. So my thinking was that if I actually put more thought into it, I could maybe produce even less waste. Everything started from there.”
The first steps were surprisingly easy for Pals and she started to investigate. “What waste am I still producing? Where did it come from? Did it come from bathroom products? From cleaning supplies? I really tried to trace back where the items came from and if there were reusable or natural alternatives.” By looking at it in this way, item per item, she found out that there were alternatives for pretty much everything. In eight months’ time, Pals went from a full bin to one with almost nothing left in it. She was happy with her lifestyle, but didn’t feel the need to tell the world about it. Yet.
Foto: Elisah Pals
Paradise lost
Until Pals went to Colombia three years later and found herself on a dirty, littered beach. “It was supposed to be an idyllic place and there were no people living close by. However, it was completely full of trash and it didn’t belong to anyone: it came floating in from the sea. All that waste was kind of anonymous and it could potentially be from anyone on the planet. For me, it symbolised how we collectively deal with our stuff. The things we use, consume and so easily discard.” She decided right then and there that she wanted to share the knowledge she had accumulated the past three years while living her zero-waste lifestyle. “I thought: if I can share the knowledge that I now have with as many other people as possible, then maybe we can work on preventing this from happening. This waste doesn’t have to be on this beach, we collectively need to do something. Change our ways, our society.”
From then on, Pals decided that she didn’t just want to focus on finetuning her own lifestyle, but to make her circle of influence as big as possible: tell other people, share the things she already knew about zero waste and work towards less waste as a society. Soon after she got home from her travel, she started a public Facebook group: Zero Waste Netherlands. Within two months’ time, the group gained 2,000 followers and they started doing plastic attacks at supermarkets. The videos went viral. Nowadays, the initiative has 70,000 followers on different platforms and 75 local communities that share local zero waste tips and tricks. Zero Waste Netherlands also reaches out to small business, big companies and legislators, consulting them on how to create a more sustainable future on a small or large scale.
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There are alternatives for pretty much everything
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We collectively need to do something else
The psychology of zero waste
Even though being the frontwoman of an ecological initiative is quite different than being a psychologist, Pals former career and study have proven to be quite useful in changing people’s mind about circularity. “In my previous job, I would help ill people reintegrate into the work space, but disease prevention was also a big part of my job.
Instead of solving problems, I could prevent them. And that mindset is actually the same with zero waste: it’s not about recycling more, but it’s really about preventing the waste from being created in the first place. It’s a big parallel for me.” Just like helping people creating healthier lifestyle choices, making environmentally friendly life choices are about behavioural change. “We are actually not rational creatures. We’re very much emotional and social creatures. Those two elements are the basis of the choices of our behaviour.” People will find it harder to make sustainable choices when their environment is not doing the same. “We do and buy what other people do. Or what we think the social norm is. So, our behaviour is very much socially driven.
If you focus on giving people the right example and changing the social norm or breaking social taboos, we can help people make better individual choices as well. Mostly, what I want people to know is that the zero waste movement is a very positive and hopeful one. People can start really small in their own home, by changing their shampoo bottle for a shampoo bar. And from there you can take the next step and the next and it will become a way of thinking. This will make us a lot more future proof.”
Curious about Elisah's whole story?
Elilsah Pals (Zero Waste NL) on a waste-free economy