UC Berkeley

Waste is being generated and discarded at unprecedented and alarming rates. Waste of all materials and products is creating air, water, and soil pollution, causing biodiversity loss and harming human health. Such destruction came fast and such destructive practices can be altered. That alteration, I propose, can come through a policy-based sustainability transition towards waste-free systems. I introduce the term ‘towards waste-free systems’ as, I hope, a unifying and galvanizing term to align an otherwise disparate preexisting assemblage of actors fostering or inhibiting action towards less waste. In support of wastelessness, many actors have made substantial and remarkable inroads against the locked-in make-take-discard consumption culture. They have passed policies, created alternative use systems, and conducted cross-disciplinary education and awareness. They have removed persistent organic pollutants from our packaging, increased producer responsibility in the disposal process, and curbed the use of some of the most damaging materials. Yet, waste continues to be generated, ecosystem harm continues, and human health continues to be compromised. In this dissertation, I propose we can make substantially more progress by framing and driving a sustainability transition towards waste-free systems through policy strategies. Co-authors and I conducted numerous studies, at varying geographical scales, through multiple methodologies, to examine policies as they relate to the sustainability transition towards waste-free systems. These studies include a review of all anti-single use disposable (SUD) foodware policies in the US; an assessment of the effectiveness of one historic anti-SUD foodware policy in Berkeley, California; an impact-based approach of China’s policy to no longer accept 70% of the US’s discarded plastics; and a deep dive into the policies paused, by whom, and for what reasons, that spurred the creation of exorbitant SUD foodware and healthcare waste (‘hygiene waste’) during COVID-19. These studies, grounded in sustainability transition theory and discard studies, demonstrate that achieving waste-free systems is both obtainable and necessary, but that such efforts face many obstacles along the way.