Trash Talk

More than four years ago, Lauren Singer stopped producing trash. Before she knew it, she was building a no-waste empire. This month on ELLE.com, she shows you how it’s done

- Keziah Weir

The first thing people often note about Brooklyn-based Lauren Singer, 26, is that she can (and does) fit her last four-plus years’ worth of trash into a 16-ounce mason jar. The second, not unrelated, is that once Singer takes up a cause, she goes all in.

Five years ago, Singer—born in Bedford, New York—was a passionate climate activist majoring in environmental studies at New York University when she realized that for all her marching and proselytizing, her daily habits weren’t aligned with her self-proclaimed life mission. “If I was going to care about this, then I had to live my day-to-day life like I cared about it,” she says. For the first time, she didn’t feel dependent upon politicians to make big changes that would protect the environment— she was making them for herself.