Talking Trash With Seattle’s Zero Waste Hero, Moji Igun
Moji Igun in a conversation | Source: Blue Daisi
Usually when trash talk starts, someone’s going to end up with their ass kicked. But when I met up with Moji Igun at the Retreat Coffeehouse in Greenwood and we started talking trash, there wasn’t any animosity, only enthusiasm. Moji has a way of taking a subject that most people find either boring or disgusting, garbage, and making it so interesting that you can’t wait to hear more.
She’s the only person I’ve met who seems genuinely excited to talk about trash. Whether it’s composting, recycling, or trash sorting, an infectious enthusiasm rolls off of her. She makes me walk away from every conversation wondering what more I could do to eliminate the waste in my life.
This time, we met up on the patio just outside the plant-lined walls of Retreat Coffeehouse, off the southeastern edge of Green Lake Park in North Seattle. Moji had a new project she was involved in through her zero-waste consulting business, Blue Daisi, and it bubbled up to the surface almost as soon as we started talking.
Reusing Cups and Reducing Waste
As she started to describe the project, it occurred to me that I never expected to meet anyone who would get giddy about volunteering to spend their Saturday evening sorting trash. But sitting there across from me was a bright, young, Black woman talking about helping zoo-visitors sort trash with only slightly less enthusiasm than a kid fresh off a field trip to the zoo.
She had volunteered at the Woodland Park Zoo to see the r.Cup project in action. The r.Cup project is part of the initiative Reuse Seattle, which aims to reduce waste around the city and which Moji is contracted to support.
“The r.Cup project is a way to introduce reusable cups into public events that can be washed and reused,” Moji said.
The city is using the annual summer concert series at the zoo as a pilot to see if it’s effective and identify any obstacles that might make it hard to rollout elsewhere.
She told me she’s not officially involved in what’s happening at the zoo, but she volunteered anyway to see firsthand how it worked and how people reacted to it. She hoped to get ideas for how to make it easier and less confusing for folks as they eventually expand the project beyond the zoo, when she’ll be formally involved. After all, people tend to have a hard enough time with the usual three bins for trash, compost, and recycling, and Moji saw that when you mix things up, most people scratch their heads.
“I had a lot of folks asking, ‘what’s this fourth bin for?’,” she said. “So, my job was to be at the trash station and explain to people how to sort their trash.”
Washable, reusable cups at a public concert might seem like a weird idea to some, but from where Moji stood, it seemed to be well worth the effort. It’s creating exactly the kind of effect that folks like Moji had hoped it would.
“At my station,” she said, “I only had one bag of landfill trash the whole night.”
Of course, Moji’s wasn’t the only trash-sorting station at the Zoo’s concert venue. Still, the other four had similar results: only one or two bags of landfill-bound trash each, compared to what easily could have been dozens in the days before any sort of trash sorting.
Though, even with the limited landfill trash, there was still plenty of food waste and recycling. You can’t win every battle.
The success of the early efforts at the Zoo bodes well for the future of the r.Cup project. What’s happening this summer is a test run for a future city-wide initiative that would eventually bring Seattle’s sea of independent coffee shops into the mix.
“The goal is to make it easier for coffee shops to offer reusable cups,” Moji said.
This would go beyond the mugs that some cafes offer when you get a drink to stay or the 25cent discount some shops offer to the lucky few who remember to bring their thermos from home. The project would allow coffee shops to offer reusable cups for to-go orders to anyone. The cups wouldn’t be yours to keep though. A big challenge, then, is how to get those cups back to the coffee shops once a customer is done with them.
The solution? Special “trashcans” spread around the city specifically for the cups.
You’d just toss your cup, pretty much like you normally would, in one of the specially marked bins, and a third-party would pick up the cups every few days, wash them, and redistribute them to businesses.
“This is pretty easy to imagine in a place like Green Lake where it’s really walkable with a lot of businesses and trash bins already around,” Moji said. “But it gets trickier in other parts of the city.”
Even trickier still is getting people to participate and not just revert to old habits and throwaway the reusable cups. Though, that’s really the goal of the program.
“We’re trying to figure out how to facilitate behavior change,” Moji said. “A lot of people want to recycle and play their part, but it’s hard”
To make it easy for people and businesses, they want to make support part of the program. But it’s not like they can have people standing at every set of trashcans around the city to explain how passersby can sort their trash. They have to get creative with the support they offer.
Even with the support they aim to provide, some people will still throw the cups straight in the trash without a second thought. Others might take the free reusable cup home. In either case, the cup is removed from the cycle and can’t be reused by the businesses as intended. It will need to be replaced, which comes at a cost.
“There’s still an economic component that needs to be figured out to make it easier for businesses to participate,” Moji said. “Right now, businesses would be charged for every lost cup.”
Regardless of the challenges to sort out and the obstacles to overcome – among them who exactly would wash and redistribute the cups – this program helps the city take a huge step toward a circular economy. With a lot of sustainable-minded Seattleites asking for zero-waste programs, this will be a welcome addition for many.
“We’re seeing a big push from consumers to make zero waste and sustainability more possible,” Moji said, “so cities and businesses need to create the infrastructure to support it.”
How a Green Dream Became a Reality
Working on a project like this is a dream come true for Moji. When she launched Blue Daisi almost 4 years ago, she did it because she wanted to help small businesses become truly sustainable and create the kind of systems that could enable zero-waste living. But really her business was born of her own frustrations. Before she ever thought about consulting, Moji was trying to go zero waste in her own life but quickly found that it was all but impossible.
“I had to do so much leg work,” she said,” driving to four different grocery stores, researching one product versus another. It was practically a full-time job just to try.”
When she realized the world wasn’t set-up to support sustainability, she decided to annoy some of her favorite small businesses to figure out what was getting in the way. She asked them questions, published the interviews on her blog, and started to notice a common thread: They needed help.
A lot of businesses wanted to do more but didn’t know how or where to start. She realized she could provide the resources and support they needed. With one realization came another: She could finally pursue her dream career, working in sustainability and climate action.
This had been a goal of hers for most of her life, but her Nigerian parents didn’t see that as an option. So, when she enrolled in the University of Michigan, she did what practically any child of immigrants would do: she appeased her parents. She got a degree in Mechanical Engineering. But she refused to let go of her passion, and she added on a minor in Sustainability to scratch the itch.
“It was only like three courses,” Moji said, “so I didn’t learn much.
It might not have been much. But it was something and it was enough to keep her dream alive.
With a degree in her pocket and her passions on her mind, she entered the working world and landed a job at a construction company. She told them up front. before they even hired her, that she wanted to work on projects with a sustainability focus.
“I really wanted to work on LEED projects,” Moji said, referring to one of the national standards for high-efficiency buildings, “but none of our clients wanted to do LEED because it was too expensive.”
The clients she worked with seemed to see LEED like a lead weight that would drown their projects if they tied themselves to it. But that wasn’t going to stop Moji from pursuing her green dreams. When she found out about the “Green Team” at the company, she jumped right in and started helping them out. It turned out to be the perfect opportunity.
“We mostly did small activities like beach clean ups,” she said. “But eventually, I heard someone talk about wanting to do a community garden at the office. This was right around the time I had gotten into gardening at home, so I thought ‘Hey, I can get the company to pay for my gardening supplies and give me the space to grow things? I got to get in on this.’”
With that, she leapt forward and took the lead on the company’s community garden. She pulled together the budgets, pitched it to her bosses, and got it all set-up and growing. This project taught her a lot about what it takes to get companies and executives to support sustainable initiatives: skills and experiences she still uses as a consultant.
Beyond teaching her a lot, the company’s community garden became a huge success on its own. A whole community sprouted around the garden. It wasn’t just about what they were growing either. They would share recipes, exchange tips for healthier living, and just generally enjoy each other’s company while they played in the dirt.
All of the work on the garden watered the seedling of sustainability that had taken root inside of Moji. Not only did the birth of the garden coincide with her decision to get into gardening, it corresponded with her efforts to grow her blog and provide zero-waste resources to small businesses. Everything was starting to come together, even if it didn’t seem to be following a tidy, five-year plan like most of us imagine for ourselves.
At that point, she realized something. “Zero waste and sustainability was something I could make my career,” Moji said to me, her voice filled with the same air of amazement that she breathed when the realization first came over her just a few years ago.
The question then became, what would it take to make the switch and turn Blue Daisi into a full-time thing? The biggest thing she knew it would take was time.
“I’m totally cool with being an overnight success in ten years,” she said.
She embraced the slow and steady mindset, and took things step by step. She pursued a TRUE zero waste certification, took some online courses through UW Tacoma on sustainable business, and enrolled in a program for women of color in entrepreneurship.
Despite the strong desire pulling her down her path, she wasn’t in any rush. She wanted to make every step deliberate. That’s not the case for everyone.
During our interview, Moji recalled going to a conference early on where she met another girl trying to do the same thing as her. The girl told her, “I’m just going to try this out for a year and see how it goes.” Moji could hardly believe it. She thought it would take at least five years for her to get where she wanted to be.
I didn’t ask if Moji knew what happened to the other girl and her business. I imagine it was the same thing that happens to most people who approach a pursuit haphazardly and without intention, without a commitment to the long-haul slog. Whether it be starting a business or just getting in shape, the whimsical approach almost always amounts to failure and a lot of lessons learned.
For folks like Moji though, patience and perseverance pay off. Three-and-a-half years in, she’s hit some major milestones and business goals, and she’s quite proud of how she’s starting to grow her business. She’s hired a part-time assistant to help her stay organized and keep her projects on track. She even brought together a team of freelancers to build out a new website to reflect the new stage of business she’s entering. She’s winning contracts with the City of Seattle, serving on sustainability advisory boards, and quickly becoming Seattle’s go-to gal for anything zero waste.
Overcoming the Challenges to Make Zero Waste Real
Even with all of her great personal progress and Seattle’s own efforts to create sustainable systems, there’s still a lot of work to be done to make sustainability a reality. It turns out that businesses face just as many challenges as consumers when they try to go zero waste – a fact that most of us take for granted.
“Consumers often oversimplify what businesses could do,” Moji said. “Consumers will say, ‘how come they don’t just switch out this for that?’ when there’s a lot that goes into it. There’s the cost for the business and even the question of how to keep things going. A business might say they want to start a new program, launch it, and try to do it for a few weeks or even a couple months, but it can be hard to keep it going. And if you only have four people in the business, you have to get everyone on board for it to work.”
Even though it’s hard work full of challenges and complications, Moji loves what she does. She especially loves when her clients are eager to make changes based on the conversations she has with them and the resources she offers. As we talked, she remembered working with the Black woman behind a subscription-box service called Get the Bag, which sends out products from Black-owned businesses.
“After I gave her a one-hour consultation,” Moji said, “she was really excited and listed off a bunch of things she was going to do to reduce the waste her business produces. It was just great to see.”
Those are the kinds of interactions that fuel Moji. That and seeing how the zero-waste community has evolved. When she first got started on her personal zero-waste journey, back before the days of Blue Daisi, she felt like all the conversations were stuck scratching the surface.
“We were arguing over straws and not things that actually mattered,” she said.
But Moji didn’t care about that or about how aesthetic zero-waste living could be. She wanted to make an impact. She wanted to see how they could make systemic changes that would make zero waste accessible for everyone. Thankfully, in recent years, she’s seen more conversations about the circular economy and the just transition in the community.
Of course, a big idea like the circular economy – keeping goods and resources out of the landfill, cycling through the economy in different forms – comes with its own set of challenges. One of Moji’s biggest concerns continues to be the accessibility of circular solutions and the funding to implement them.
“Most of the time,” she said, “I’m the only Black woman in the room in these conversations, and often the only person of color. So, the perspective is very centered in White thinking, and it’s reflected in what people lift up and the language they use.”
Language and communication are big problems in the climate movement in general, but especially so on this side of things. Moji realizes that most folks have no idea what the circular economy is, and if that’s the only language used, a lot of people are left out.
“But if you talk about mending and reuse,” she said,” there are a lot of people who have already been doing this.”
At the root of this problem is a common dilemma: When we can’t understand each other, we can’t work together; we can’t advance shared solutions to our common problems. That’s why Moji says loud and clear, as often as possible: We need to use the language communities already use. But a lot of people she talks to either don’t understand that or don’t want to hear it.
Not only does this affect the conversations we can have, it has huge implications for how the climate movement grows and the solutions we pursue.
“The parts of the climate movement I find most interesting and most effective are one’s being led by community and by BIPOC folks,” Moji said, “but they’re also the ones that receive the least attention and the least funding. They aren’t seen as effective because people in power don’t understand the solutions and don’t understand the language used by the communities.”
Despite the challenges, Moji’s hopeful about the direction we’re headed.
Embracing the Mess that Comes with Progress
“The circular economy is definitely possible,” she said. “It won’t be perfect, and it will take a lot of work. But if it’s done with equity and a holistic view, it’s a big step in the right direction.”
Unfortunately, equity isn’t a driver for everyone. In fact, Moji has seen a lot of businesses pursuing the circular economy as just another way to make money. In her view this profiteering approach isn’t what the circular economy is about. Moji sees the circular economy as a more anti-capitalist, economic ideal than some folks expect, or are willing to accept.
Most business leaders and entrepreneurs want to keep doing things the way they’ve been done. Never mind the fact that the way things have been done is what caused climate change in the first place. Never mind the fact that, as Moji pointed out, when we try to fit climate action into existing frameworks, we slow ourselves down.
“But what if we just broke the whole thing and started over?” Moji asked, not entirely hypothetically.
Of course, she knows quite well that that’s easier said than done.
“I wish people would be more okay with the mess in the short term,” she said,” but humans have a hard time with change. People are really resistant to it. We need people who are visionary to help others get comfortable with the mess and embrace change.”
Whether she knows it or not, that’s exactly who she is and what she does.
That kind of visionary leadership is something we can all contribute to by talking to people about the kind of world we want to live in and how we can create it, and offering support in the process. Just like Moji does. If we do that, we can achieve the kind of progress that Moji defines: “Having a clear vision and moving closer to it.”
Moji’s vision is a zero-waste world.
What’s yours?
