Book Review
A Family Guide to Waste-Free Living
Lauren & Oberon Carter 2019. Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd., Sydney.
Simple ways to eliminate waste in the home, at work & out in the world.
A Family Guide to Waste-Free Living is an access-all-areas approach to setting out on a more sustainable lifestyle. It ticks boxes that were not even there to tick. It does not demand you go ‘zero waste’ and turn your life on its head. It uses non-intimidating but very specific language that enables it to walk a tightrope between being an easily understood and digestible record of a journey, as well as a very well-crafted and structured manual for change.
This handbook is a yarn. A really honest and transparent yarn for that matter. It is the story of a family and their choice to make some changes to their habits and lifestyle. It was a conscious choice. It was open-ended from the beginning and remains open at the conclusion. Hang on - doesn’t a book start with an introduction and finish with a conclusion? Herein lies the beauty of this book: there is no set destination and outcome! We, the readers, get to follow the authors’ footsteps all the way to a point which feels just right for us. There is nothing contained within or proposed by this book that any one of us can’t have a go at. If the most difficult aspect of any change is the getting started, then all you need is the starter and their starter’s pistol to be fired. Lauren and Oberon Carter have mounted the stand and fired the pistol, so dive in!
This book is available for loan from the Fleurieu Environment Centre