‘Zero waste’ queen on the five Rs of her eco-friendly lifestyle: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle and rot
Bea Johnson’s simple-living epiphany has had profound impact on everything from her flexible wardrobe to shared toiletries and creative make-up
Path finder I grew up in the south of France with my parents and two brothers. I wouldn’t call my upbringing “environmental” but my dad could repair anything, even incandescent light bulbs, and my mom made all our clothes. She cooked a lot, she canned a lot, she sewed, she knitted. And I sort of ignored all this.
After high school, my friends seemed to have a path, but that was not my case. Since I had really bad grades in English, I thought I should be a French au pair, so I moved to California. Towards the end of that year, when I was 19, I met my husband, Scott.
Cultural exchange After we married, we lived in London, Amsterdam and Paris – my husband was project manager for a tech company – but when I got pregnant, I wanted to experience the American-soccer-mom-as-seen-on-TV way of life. We lived in a large home outside San Francisco, and after seven years of driving my sons Max and Leo everywhere, part of me felt I was kind of dying.
In 2006, we decided to rent an apartment for a year while we looked for a place closer to the city. We only moved in with the necessities and it was during that year we discovered the great advantage of living simply.
Setting a goal When we found our new house and got everything out of storage, we started letting go of all that stuff we’d accumulated and hadn’t even missed. In 2008, we decided to adopt a more environmentally friendly way of life. We watched our energy consumption, we watched our water consumption and we started looking at our trash.
