On a recent course that I was facilitating we were talking about David Holmgren’s Permaculture Principles. Having looked at the whole list I asked the group if they found any of the principles more difficult of challenging.

“Produce no waste!” called out one of the participants. “I mean how is that even possible?”

In the extractive culture that most folk reading this are part of this response was not entirely surprising. Our lives are impacted in huge and varied ways by businesses and individuals who have little concern for waste. Items are made with obsolescence planned into the design, things are over packaged in materials that last for millennia but which are hard to reuse, and the preference to make things out of the cheapest materials often has dire environmental consequences.

Most of us know all of this, but out industrialised culture tries hard to shape our viewpoint so that other ways of doing things that are more ecologically harmonious feel impossible.

Permaculture Design provides us with a toolkit that invites us to look to nature and to learn from her complexity and abundance. On this basis as soon as we look more closely at living systems in even the slightest detail it is clear that they are not wasteful. Everything has a place, and everything is cycled back in to create a loop that is closed.

So in terms of our own work and lives what can we do to reduce the waste that we produce, or to stop producing waste entirely? There are essentially two different approaches that we can take to this…

At its essence waste is simply a yield without a purpose. This offers the possibility to turn waste into a yield by finding a use for it – like the leisure centre in Devon, which has started using waste heat from a data centre to warm the water in their swimming pool! And if you aren’t able to do this could you find a way of changing what you do so that the item that is destined to become waste is never used in the first place?

The world that we live in makes it really, really difficult for us to “produce no waste” but that challenge is the result of a dysfunctional system!  In using permaculture design tools to help us ask the right questions we can start to make tweaks and changes to the lives that we lead which make it genuinely possible to live a life which is focused upon abundance rather than waste.