Episode 3 - Revealing Luxury Brands’ Dirty Waste Secrets
Season 1, Episode 3 - Revealing Luxury Brands’ Dirty Waste Secrets with Anna Sacks
About this Episode
Meet the woman who digs through and documents Manhattan’s waste, to divert from landfill, raise consciousness, and create systemic change. Anna Sacks, aka the Trash Walker, creates viral TikTok and Instagram videos that shed light on the brand new merchandise that luxury brands deliberately destroy, as part of their continued efforts to fuel the relentless pace of a fashion system that is wasteful, unjust, and unsustainable.
Anna focuses on more than just fashion or brand waste, too - she rifles through city garbage to salvage good, quality stuff that ends up in the garbage. She has found canned food and fresh food, hundreds of dollars of fresh-pressed juice, toys, dishes, typewriters, clothing, candy, brand-new school supplies, and the list goes on. The amount of stuff that she finds is staggering - as is how perfectly usable it is.
This conversation explores not just our society’s waste problems - but also solutions, from legislation to personal action to being less polite in our dissent. It looks at how we are increasingly finding excessive waste as unacceptable, and are voicing our discontent, resisting this wasteful status quo, and searching for ways of living that prioritize sharing over ownership.
Show Notes
Adamah Jewish Farming Fellowship
The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard
Katherine Hayhoe: The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: Talk about it
Guardian: The woman who rifles through New York’s garbage - exposing the city’s excesses
Transcript
Alice Irene Whittaker (intro): Welcome to Reseed, a podcast about repairing our relationship to nature. Reseed tells the stories of a RE generation: the people embracing repair, redesign, reuse, and reduction. The people who are uprooting the extractive status quo and rooting the future in justice, wellbeing, resilience, and care. This is a podcast for those of us who are re-imagining our relationship to the natural world and to each other. I am Alice Irene Whittaker, the host of Reseed. Together, let's plant the seeds that transform us from being takers to caretakers.
Alice Irene: Welcome. Today, I speak with Anna Sacks, AKA the Trash Walker who digs through and documents Manhattan's waste to divert from landfill, raise consciousness and create systemic change.
Anna Sacks: We're living out of bounds with the planets. We need to be comfortable with less and I actually think, hopefully for people, it be a welcome change because I feel like so many of us are just overwhelmed with stuff. I personally am overwhelmed with stuff, especially since I go through the trash and pull out usable things and I feel like I'm bailing out a sinking boat.
Alice Irene: Anna's viral Tik Tok and Instagram videos shed light on the brand new merchandise that luxury brands deliberately destroy as part of their continued efforts to fuel the relentless pace of a fashion system that is wasteful, unjust, and unsustainable. Anna makes sure that citizens see what they try and hide in the trash. She focuses on more than just fashion or brand waste too. She rifles through city trash to salvage good quality stuff that ends up in the garbage. She has found canned food and fresh food, hundreds of dollars of fresh pressed juice, toys, dishes, typewriters, clothing, candy, brand, new school supplies. And the list goes on. The amount of stuff that she finds is staggering as is how perfectly usable it is. All in bags and dumpsters lining the city streets to be shipped off to a landfill or incinerator. When we know that we're blazing through the limits of waste that our planet can hold and the resources that can be extracted to make all of this stuff in the first place.
Alice Irene: It's appalling. When you look through her photos of everything she's unearthed, and that is only what one person has witnessed in one city. It's hard not to imagine all of the cities and towns, all of the garbage bags, all of the waste. I can't help but think of archeologists who learn about the societies of the past by searching through the garbage that they leave behind. Anna is like a scientist exposing truths about our own society in real time and documenting them a living history of a society marked by waste, overconsumption, and drawing on global south labor to create cheap goods and global south land to hide its waste. This is where I feel like I need to take a deep breath.
Alice Irene: We're also a society of people who are increasingly finding this wasteful way of living as unacceptable. And we're voicing our discontent, resisting this wasteful status quo and searching for ways of living that prioritize sharing over ownership. Anna and I talk about her story of working in an investment bank and on a regenerative farm. We explore waste, how luxury brands react to her viral video, telling stories through media and social media, and the donate don't dump legislation and coalition that she is advocating for to create systemic change. Here is my conversation with Anna Sacks.
Alice Irene: Hi Anna, thanks for being here with me today.
Anna: Hey, thanks for having me.
Alice Irene: I'd love to start looking backwards at your childhood and what relationship you had with the natural world as a child.
Anna: I actually don't remember so much about nature in my childhood. There was definitely going to the park, but I grew up in New York City. So there isn't a lot of nature in New York City. There's central park, which is one of my favorite places. But yeah, I really don't think I had a strong relationship to nature as a child.
Alice Irene: You mentioned New York a couple of times there and New York definitely seems to be a part of your identity and certainly your work. I'm so intrigued to hear how you first started your trash walks. So searching through trash to expose this practice that fashion brands have of destroying their brand new products to fuel overconsumption. What's the story of the very first time you searched through the trash and started doing this, what did it look like and feel like? Bring me into that story.
Anna: New York City is a big part of it because we have our waste on the curb and it's kind of accessible that way. My first trash experience was in high school my freshman year, and it seemed like an older woman had passed away or downsized and they were clearing out her apartment. And so on the curb, there was a trunk just full of vintage clothing. And then I think there was a couple of trash bags also. So my friend and I were walking actually back from a consignment store cause we loved and still love to thrift or to buy secondhand and came upon this, brought it all to her place and divided it up. So that was my first experience with, with waste and New York City.
Anna: And then I worked at an investment bank for a couple of years after college then went to a regenerative farm. And then from that came back to New York City. It was really looking at the waste with like these fresh eyes because of this alternative that I had seen on the farm, where we really didn't consume a lot outside of, you know, the food that we produced on the farm. And we didn't produce a lot of waste as a result. And what we did produce, if there was excess food, we composted it and we recycled. So, there were eight of us living together. We would empty the trash, maybe once a week with one trash bag, but usually like every couple of weeks. So walking around New York City, then noticing all the piles of trash that we have or waste that we have on the curb and being curious about what exactly is.
Alice Irene: This is really fascinating to me that you worked at an investment bank and then a regenerative farm. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you found each of those various experiences and any contrast reflections from the two?
Anna: The investment bank came through a family connection and I did East Asian languages and cultures as a major in college. And it's an East Asia or Asia focused investment bank. So there was natural fit in a way, but it was through family connections that I was able to get the opportunity. I did this weekend retreat at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, and learned about Adamah, which is a Jewish farming fellowship. And it was basically everything that I've been looking for because I'd been there for several years and I really like my colleagues, I really like my boss. I'm still close with them and I really liked a lot of aspects of it. It was cool. It was cool to see like the inner workings of companies, some of them work in like kind of a roundabout way. I was able to find as meaningful, but it wasn't inherently meaningful.
Anna: I found out about this program and then was looking for an alternative because working at an investment bank, which is part of like this larger financial and corporate system is very draining. And it meant that I couldn't make any plans on the weeknights because I wouldn't know when I would have to kind of be on call or have to do work. And I would end up at first, like when I was there, I would try to make plans and have to cancel a lot. And then I just learned not to make plans. It was very difficult to make those sacrifices. And so it wasn't bad relative to what some other places do, but it was still difficult and learning about this other program and seeing the farm when I was at Isabella Freedman and it was just what I was looking for.
Anna: And going back to the nature question, one of the things that was difficult was when I was at the investment bank, I would take the subway in the morning and then be in the office building all day. And then I was in Rock Center. You go downstairs and there's like this kind of mini mall underneath the ground. And so I would go there to get my lunch and then go back to my office and eat at my computer and then leave at, you know, ordering dinner usually if I was working late at my desk and then leave and take the subway, or if it was really late a cab home and then never really set foot outside other than a quick walk to the subway.
Anna: And so there was a total disconnection between nature and the weather and a total lack of awareness of anything that has to do with the seasons. And in contrast on the farm, you have to know so much about when is it going to start to get freezing at night? When do we have to pull all the crops? When is it right for harvesting? All those things, you have to be so connected with nature and weather. I mean, it was all on the computer, all indoors versus outside and using your body, something that was very mental versus something that also emphasizes more spiritual components. So it was this contrast between the two and it was feeling this need that I had neglected for several years.
Alice Irene: Your experience resonates with me. I used to commute for hours a day, and I remember sometimes just really not going outside at all, you know, getting into the car when it was still dark, driving for two hours, going right down to a parking garage, up the elevator to the computer, reverse that whole thing and get back home after dark and just not seeing the sky, seeing the trees. So I can relate to that and feel such a juxtaposition between those two experiences you’ve had.
Anna: It's not natural it's and it's not healthy. And it's not just that the investment banks, the kind of workplace expectation, I think in America in general that you're going to have your lunch in front of your computer. And like kind of be on email or browsing or doing whatever, but it's not, it's not healthy to live this way. It contributes to this like overall, really rushed life to disconnection from the earth and from cycles and seasons and a feeling of like separation. Like that somehow that we are separate from everything else that's going on in the world. And that we can be in our own little bubble and not have to pay attention to the climate, for example.
Alice Irene: Right. It's so emblematic of how we treat the planet, how we treat our people as well, right? Like a resource to be exploited, like you were mentioning, not in a way that is respecting cycles, like rest and creativity. Not that we would just be productive all the time, for example.
Anna: Exactly.
Alice Irene: We know that we're coming up against and are even blazing through Earth's boundaries and that we're producing these extravagant amounts of waste. And it's shocking that companies, as you've exposed are ruining their own products and then they go and produce ever increasing amounts of more product. What have you learned about why companies are doing this?
Anna: There are different reasons. There's the governments incentives or disincentives, which is what I'm working on with the donate don't dump coalition to adjust those. And that has to do with if you donate merchandise, you still have to pay import tax on it versus if you destroy the merchandise, you don't have to pay the import tax. So stuff like that, that just doesn't make sense. There’s also a cap on the amount that corporations can donate, just like there's a cap on individuals that what we can donate and then use to lessen the amount of tax that we pay. It's 25% of the taxable income. So it's not like for corporations that they usually run up to it, but in the case of COVID and stores being closed for spring, they actually did run up to it because they had all this unsold merchandise. So I think we need to lift that cap. And there's no cap on the amount that corporations can destroy.
Anna: And when they deliberately destroy products, they write it off as a loss, which also lowers their taxable income. So I think we need to broaden the delta between donation versus destruction. And then also I think we need to figure out how we can encourage corporations to produce less because we know we overproduce, we overproduce food. 40% of the food in the US is wasted. We overproduce clothing, we overproduce holiday related merchandise. We overproduce so much and it's not healthy. And it's actually not - it's a physical impossibility to continue living this way. And that was something also that when I went from the investment bank to the farm, at Adamah, we watched the Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard. And that was really eye-opening to me because when I was doing at the investment bank, mergers and acquisitions and capital raises and part of that is you put together this like packet of not only the company, but the industry in general and the industry trends. And so you pull from different reports about like, where is this industry headed in the next five years, ten years, what are the trends? And always the assumption is continued growth. So it's not just matching the previous years, production or output. It's increasing it by 5%, by 10%, depending on what the industry is. And that's an impossibility.
Anna: We're living out of bounds with the planets. That needs to be part of the legislation, just like producing less. And we need to be comfortable with less and I actually think, hopefully for people, will be a welcome change. Cause I feel like so many of us in the US and in other wealthy countries are just overwhelmed with stuff. I personally am overwhelmed with stuff, especially since I go through the trash and pull out usable things. And I feel like I'm like bailing out a sinking boat or the water faucet is running and running and running, and I'm trying to mop up the floor instead of turning off the faucet. We need to focus on consistent overproduction. So that's one reason, which is like the way in which the government sets or does not set incentives and disincentives.
Anna: And then another one is more unspoken, which is that corporations if they're a luxury or a mid luxury brand, they don't want to be associated with lower income people typically, or they don't want their products to be in like charity shops. Lower brands, like Old Navy, they don't want to quote unquote cannibalize their own market. So corporations will come up with whatever excuses that they want in order to justify continuously overproducing and not donating and not saving for the next year or anything like that. It reduces a sense of scarcity so that we feel like we're at balance and corporations don't have to discount their prices further or what the reality is, is that supply and demand are not matching in like basic economic terms. And when that happens and when you have too much supply, not enough demand. What is supposed to happen naturally is corporations are supposed to lower their prices, but they don't do that. Especially if it's a luxury brand, they don't want to put items on sale and they don't want to mark things down to where they actually would be sold. So that is another option for corporations is discount it, discount it some more, discount it some more and if you're not okay with discounting it at 90%, because that's really where the demand lies for something at that price point, then stop making it. So that's also an option for if corporations are not interested in or don't want to donate, they should be discounting it even more.
Anna: And it's also something that I think we all need to recognize is that like we pay the price in many ways for the corporations over production. One of it is because it's not being sold the price point of everything else needs to be higher to absorb the fact that 20% or 30% of the merchandise or food is not going to be sold.
Alice Irene: There are a couple of important threads in there I wanted to pick up on. One was this shameful fact that companies don't want lower income people to be wearing their products, showing their brands. They'd rather destroy it and waste it rather than donate. How does marginalization and justice fit into the issue of fashion and fashion waste?
Anna: I mean at every point of this, there needs to be discounting of people's humanity or viewing them as not as human as we are. We, as in wealthy people in the US and Europe who are largely in control of these brands. The people who dye the clothing, the people who sew the clothing, the people who sell the clothing at the stores, the people who hauled the clothing to landfills and incinerators, the people who live near landfills and incinerators. Where the fast fashion industry specifically is negatively impacting all of these people.
Anna: I think there's not enough repercussions for corporations, and therefore they continue to overproduce and to harm people along every step of the way. And I think it's especially gross that when you think about all the resource extraction and labor and greenhouse gas emitted, and water usage for all of that, to then just end up being wasted and going to landfill or incinerator where it's then going to emit, not only emissions, but toxic particles into the air. I think from every step there's discounting of people's humanity. Aja Barber who works on this, I think I was listening to a podcast with her, and her point was like, would you want to do this? Like, would you, as your job want to be in a factory sewing garments for fast fashion companies and unsafe working conditions? Would you, as your job, want to be using toxic materials to dye fabric, and then maybe the fabric ending up polluting rivers, all those things? I think that the answer would be no. I don't think any of us would want that to be our jobs. If we wouldn't want that to be our jobs, then that means that we need to change it. Change the systems for the people for whom that is their job.
Alice Irene: And that whole fast fashion model is predicated on this dehumanization of people and exploitation. You mentioned also the coalition that you recently helped launch, donate don't dump. Can you talk a little bit more about what that is, what you're advocating for and are there any models that we can learn from?
Anna: So France and Italy have passed similar type of laws around food waste. And then France went further to other types of retail goods. And with France it happened in response to this news expose about what Amazon does with its returns or with its unwanted inventory, which means Amazon landfills or incinerates it. It's a huge problem and it's not only Amazon, it's a huge problem in retailers and brands in general. I want to start instead of with food, with medical items, because tampons and pads and toothpaste, shampoo, soap, I see them so frequently in the trash of CVS and Walgreens and TJ Maxx. And then also I see on the internet and Bath and Body Works, et cetera. And those items are really in need for shelters.
Anna: So I think I want to start with medical items rather than food, because with food, you know, if everyone actually were donating. What we would be doing is just shifting around waste because like I said, we overproduce food in the US and at a certain point there's too many calories and we could still solve hunger. We could solve food insecurity and just still have excess food. I think that medicine actually makes more sense. And then looking at the consistent overproduction and the coalition is consisting of different nonprofits that work in the food rescue place. I want to get more thrift stores involved, corporations, retailers, passionate individuals, environmental justice groups, waste groups, elected officials. I'm in the beginning stages of it and there's a big learning curve for me. I'm hoping that it's possible and can be done. I am hoping that it can be done this year versus a more drawn out time frame.
Alice Irene: Right. And see some of those accomplishments and that progress early on in the coalition. I really respect how you're willing to name different companies, be very vocal about it. I've seen that on your social media, how you aren't afraid to mention them by name and lean into that. How do the fashion brands react to your documentation of what they're doing? Do they ever communicate with you directly? Do they speak out against what you are doing? What does that look like?
Anna: So with Coach, with that video that went viral about their slashed items in contrast to like their circular economy commitments, they commented on their Tik Tok in response to people's comments. The woman who posted the video had multiple factual errors. I mean, I replied being like, tell me what those errors are or otherwise stop slandering me. I think very defensively overall, very, very defensively. And then also wanting, I think, to deflect. Another thing I've experienced is with corporations using excuses. When I spoke to one corporation about all the things that they discarded, they said that there was a water issue. And then when I spoke to another corporation about all the things they discarded, they said there was a sewage issue. How frequently does a sewage issue or water issue actually happen versus like, oh, we need to create an excuse? And then I asked to see like proof of their sewage issue and never heard back.
Anna: And then there's also, I've had some difficult conversations with people and my stuff is never about blaming people unless that person is in charge. But even so it's like the people who work for the brand are then defensive and embarrassed as a result can be a little bit personally nasty to me. And so I've experienced that also. People who really care about the place where they work, which you know, that's great, then messaging me and saying some nasty stuff. So yeah a range of responses. What I would like to see from corporations is more of a willingness to be like, you're right, we're going to change. This is a widespread issue. This is not just with us, but nonetheless, it doesn't make it right. And we're going to change these policies and we're going to work to change the entire industry. I haven't seen that happen.
Alice Irene: I wonder if you find it difficult ever having those difficult conversations, receiving that vitriol from people personally, is that hard for you or do you have a natural comfort with it?
Anna: No, it's hard for me. I usually maybe take screenshots and share it with my friends or family and be like, what should I respond? Or, and then mostly, you know, their advice, which I haven't always followed is don't engage. And so I have tried engaging, but now I think I'm just wanting to start blocking and not engaging with people because it is difficult. It's difficult emotionally. It's difficult with my time. It's difficult to feel personally attacked. And when I'm talking about, I think my comfort level with the work I do is because I'm talking about systems. I'm talking about corporations. Yes. I'm also talking about CEOs, but CEOs are in one of the most beneficial positions of anyone on this planet. They're in an okay position to receive criticism. They're in a more than okay position to receive criticism. And actually they can expect that as part of their job and they have a huge amount of resources to pull from. They have a huge support team. They have a lot of money. They're really well compensated for this. I don't mind speaking about the CEOs specifically like I did with the CVS’s former CEO, Larry Merlo. I named him repeatedly because I wanted him to take responsibility and I wanted him to avoid being able to express denial about this, even about him knowing that CVS is consistently destroying useful items.
Anna: But corporations are not people. And so I have a huge level of comfort talking about the issues with corporations and saying like this corporation is destroying these useful items and it needs to change. And then in contrast, it's difficult for me. I don't like interpersonal conflict. And I don't like feeling hated by someone or like I've caused pain to someone
Alice Irene: Recently, it was, if I'm not mistaken, Mary Annaise Helgar who wrote about niceness and politeness and how there isn't time for that, with the crises that we face. And as someone who's been a people pleaser and rule follower for a long time, but also incredibly passionate to my roots, to my bones about these issues, that's something I'm taking inspiration from, and that's why I'm asking because I'm so interested in all of us finding the courage to not be nice and not be polite, which are really strong cultural expectations on us, especially as women.
Anna: I've always had a strong sense of right and wrong. And my thing is, as long as I feel okay with what I'm doing or that I'm doing the right thing then I don't really care about what other people think. It's more, I don't care if someone dislikes what I'm doing, it's more, I guess, receiving messages or comments that are like personally attacking me or accusing me of doing something that that's where it gets under my skin and makes me then, try to think like, well, do I need to respond or what should I respond? And then getting into like, sometimes these prolonged conversations that I don't feel are useful and are just like these energy sucks for on my end. I think it's much more important to just feel like what I'm doing is right and therefore, I don't need to have to worry about other things, because I know that what I'm doing is right.
Alice Irene: Well said. There are interconnections between what you are doing and the other crises that we're facing collectively. So I'm thinking about climate change and biodiversity loss, gross inequality. You mentioned a couple of other ones earlier, like water, but surely there are others too, and they all interconnect and intersect in so many ways. From your vantage point, what interconnections are most pressing and resonant for you? And do you seek those connections in what you're doing or do you feel like focusing really intently on waste without muddying the waters with those interconnections is the way to go?
Anna: Yeah, I think it depends. For a long time, I never named climate change in my social media posts because I wanted it to be this bipartisan issue that in the US, how climate change has become something solely associated with the Democrats, which is a huge issue. That's a huge issue that like the Republican party has remained in denial about the climate crisis and that even the word climate change or the climate crisis has become a partisan word or charged word. I wanted to remain kind of neutral, but I've started to talk about it more because Catherine Hayhoe did a good Ted Talk about how one of the most effective things we can do for climate change, just talking about it. So it's important to talk about it. It's important to let family and friends or strangers know this is something that we all need to be concerned about.
Anna: I think it depends on with the legislation. I don't want it to be ideological at all. I want it to be very practical. I want it to be passable and I don't think it's necessary to bring in terms even like climate crisis. I think it's doable of just describing as it is. We extract resources from the planet, we use energy and water and emit different gases that are harmful in order to transform them into these products. We ship them all over the world. There are labor concerns at the extraction and creation points, and then retailers don't even sell them and then it goes to landfills and incinerators and negatively impacts communities there.
Anna: So I think like that in itself, I don't know if we have to name the climate crisis or social justice and racial justice and environmental justice. I don't know if we have to name it because in the US just those words have become partisan. And so, I mean, we'll see how we can message this. Maybe for certain groups, yes for that messaging, for certain groups, no for that messaging. I'm not sure. Because the thing is, for me, it's like, what's more important than the words or the labels is like the actual action and the actual legislation. If passing that legislation means foregoing certain words, then it's worth it. So I struggle with this. I struggle with how explicit do I want to be about naming issues? Because again, in the US these things are so charged and I don't want to put off half of the US because I think that in reality, these issues shouldn't be partisan. If people shut off just from hearing a term, then they're not going to be able to listen to everything else.
Alice Irene: I'm really interested in this idea of messaging around waste and circular economy. Waste really is this topic that unites people across divides and makes sense to people in this very tangible felt way. And it’s always that question of, do you talk about waste as waste or is circular economy gaining momentum and interesting to people or does that just become this theoretical technical conversation that takes it out of that practical felt understanding of waste?
Anna: For me, I like practical more than abstract. Like that's just how my brain is. And so for me, that's more beneficial to talk about the practical reality. And then from there, I think by the way, I feel like our dogs are barking at each other.
Alice Irene: I think our dogs are barking at each other as well.
Anna: To use that very practical, the very practical reality, to then cause change. It's about describing what's happening and then coming together with a bunch of diverse interests to figure out how can we build a better system that works for everyone?
Alice Irene: Your story has as clearly resonated with the media. So I've seen your pieces or coverage of what you're doing in the Guardian and Vogue business. You've harnessed social media to document and expose waste and to rally people to care more about this issue. Seeing is believing just like we're talking about with this practical relationship to waste that people really understand, and your audiences are seeing what's normally hidden in our society with how you're documenting it. You're showing them the waste that we throw away, what's on our street corners and hoping that it will be taken care of and pretending it doesn't exist. How do you personally use social media to tell the story? I'd love to hear more about that, how you're harnessing it and what that experience has been like.
Anna: Social media - it's been such an important tool for me, because I think this is a very visual story, Instagram, and then Tik Tok even more, have been - they just make a lot of sense for telling people about this issue more so than I think like a news article or a book, would be able to. Because I think you really need to see the scale of the waste and then also look at the items and then think to yourself like, hmm, would I what I want that item, or could I use that item? And a lot of times the answer is yes. And then thinking, well then why did they toss that item? It still looks like usable and edible to me. And then also seeing it repeatedly and just seeing it again and again and again, and getting the sense that this is not ending. This isn't a one-off thing. This is something that's much larger. It's larger in terms of the volume, it's larger in terms of the scale or how wide spread it is. I think that video and the photos do it well showing what the issue is.
Anna: And there's also so many aspects of waste to explore that I mean, it's one of the reasons why I love it. I mean, I have a complicated relationship obviously to waste, but like I find it super interesting and I am obsessed with it because you can learn about composting and recycling and reuse and repair and the legislation and the process of resource extraction and the process of, you know, like remanufacturing. There's so many ways to tackle. It is a really fertile place for exploration, I think. And then there's also the personal stories associated with waste, which I think are also frequently left out. And so like with retail workers, being able to spotlight what it's like for retail workers, for people who work in retail and are forced to destroy these usable products often well-paid, while they themselves make minimum wage, which in the US is, you know, $7.25 I think federally. Those stories are also super powerful and have been omitted.
Anna: Then also for my work in save our compost and the coalition social media is really crucial for spreading the messages and calls to action. So basically New York City cut all funding for composting in response to the COVID budget cuts in 2020. A coalition formed, and we were able to restore a crucial lifeline of 2.86 million for community composting. And the only reason why that budget cut was able to be reversed was because of the volume of calls that people received, calls, and emails, and basically citizens speaking to their elected officials and saying, this is really important to me. And it was the second most called about issue besides summer youth employment program. It was right after summer youth employment program. And it was one of the only two budget cuts that were reversed. So summer youth employment program was reversed and composting or part of the composting was reversed. And that was really a lot of people working together, you know, in this coalition.
Anna: Social media really was key though, to saying like, please call your elected official today. And here's what you can tell them. So social media, I think, can be a great tool to use for creating change.
Alice Irene: It certainly has its pitfalls. And I think we all have these complicated relationships with it, but we're so fortunate to have this to sort of democratize communications and let us tell our stories and reach people to create that momentum. I had one last question, which was around ancestors. So I like to always close on this idea of the generations that came before. And I'm curious if there's anything from your ancestry or in your family, that's contributed to those paths you've chosen of documenting our waste as a society and advocating for systemic change.
Anna: I'm glad you asked about that, because I think about my grandmothers specifically, a lot, both of them, because they both hated waste, which I think was like a very common thing for the depression era. They both were so giving and always wanting to see the best in other people and believing in second chances, believing in wanting to help people to reach their full potential, believing in care-taking. And so I think about them a lot and their legacy and like the work I'm doing is in their memory. And then also with regards to farming, my great-grandparents were farmers on my mom's side. So I think about that too. I think about, you know, it skipped several generations. Well, my grandpa grew up on a farm also. It skipped several generations, but I think about that, about returning to my ancestry in farming. It was definitely a coincidence, but I think about their legacy, you know, they cared for the land, they cared about food. And I mean, I'm not a great farmer, honestly, and I only did it for seven months, but I think about, you know, this is what they devoted their lives.
Alice Irene: And there are these echoes through us from, from them. I've been seeing this in conversations. I was actually just writing about this today and actually coincidentally writing about my grandfather, who grew up on a farm, you know, in my conversations with people, for a book I'm writing and on this podcast at first, I started hearing people speak about their ancestors and, oh, my grandfather and my grandmother, or my great-grandmother did this. And it started coming up as this thread through these different conversations. And now I ask you about it intentionally and it's so interesting seeing what people have picked up from, from their ancestors and that, that continues on today. And you mentioned coincidence, and I think there is that, but there's also something more there to explore.
Alice Irene: Thanks for listening to my conversation with Anna. I hope you enjoyed it. If our conversation resonated with you, please subscribe, review, and share. For show notes and a transcription, or to tell me what you thought visit reseed.ca. The next episode comes out in two weeks. I hope you'll join me. Reseed is created on unceded Algonquin land. Thank you to this place. Thank you to Rebecca Ryvola for podcast cover art and Teghan Acres for being an outside eye. And thank you for listening. Together, let's plant the seeds that transform us from being takers to caretakers.