Newsletters: The $2.75 I spend to feel alive

Last week, I spoke to women who have been able to fit an entire month's — in some cases, multiple years' — worth of garbage into a single Mason jar. Aside from making me feel extremely guilty about all the times I've picked a plastic spoon over a regular one because it was bendy and fun, it also introduced me to the fascinating growth of the zero-waste movement.

All over the country and the world, people are taking recycling to its logical conclusion: preventing waste from existing in the first place. And one thing that didn't make it into my piece that I thought was really fascinating was something Bea Johnson, who started living zero-waste about a decade ago, told me.

She said there's a huge misconception, particularly on Instagram, about how zero-waste must equal "extremely time-consuming DIY projects." "I've seen people on social media post a picture that says, 'Hey, I'm making my own toothpaste today! #zero-waste!' And she shows nine packaged ingredients." Not only is this obviously completely antithetical to the zero-waste movement, but Johnson also says stuff like this scares the full-time working parents who see this and think zero-waste is a time-sucking burden. It doesn't have to be, she says; you can read more about it in the full explainer.

—Rebecca Jennings, culture reporter for The Goods

The zero-waste movement is coming for your garbage

Getty Images

If you wanted, well, pretty much anything, there are about a zillion companies that would happily bring it to you right this minute. It'd probably be delivered by a series of transportation methods, by plane, train, or truck, and when it arrives, it would almost definitely come in a big box full of plastic or Styrofoam.

To many, these companies are a revelation. But as Amazon and the thousands of other businesses built around bringing you stuff have exploded in growth, they've been met with the same chorus of complaints: They create way, way too much trash. And one of the loudest voices has come from the zero-waste movement, a consumer-led, grassroots group of individuals and businesses coming for the convenience economy.

The goal: Create as little garbage as possible. Recycling isn't enough — only 9 percent of all plastic waste on Earth has been recycled. Among all the adherents of the zero- and low-waste lifestyle I spoke to, the first and foremost tenet is preventing waste from existing in the first place.

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The best $2.75 I ever spent: an NYC ferry ride

Dana Rodriguez for Vox

New York is a city where anything can happen, sure, but when you live here, it's also a place thick with inevitabilities. Trashpiss smell in the summer, visiting families walking six abreast in winter, sirens at bedtime and construction at dawn and any restaurant that you really love closing, as a reminder to never love anything.

And most inevitable of all, the subway at rush hour, when each car becomes a fully packed group meditation chamber with everyone silently focusing on some variation of the mantra, "I'm not here, you're not here, you are not touching me, I am not touching you; I am on a beach or a mountaintop or I am dead right now but none of this is happening, none of this is happening, none of this is happening." It's a nightmare, and all the worse in the past few years since the subway has been hideously boned.

This communion with your neighbors will run you $2.75 a ride, or $121 for a monthly Metrocard divided by however many trips you make in 28 to 31 days, an equation I've never been totally sure benefited me personally, but let's call it $2.75. And you know what you can get for $2.75 instead?

You can ride the NYC Ferry.

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