Those pants you bought at the fast fashion retailer, and the endless bottles of personal care products in your bathroom? Your ancestral homelands are being destroyed by them. Each year, the United States exports 200,000 tons of plastic waste to Latin American countries – places like Mexico, El Salvador, and Chile. Mexico alone was left with 76,000 tons of plastic in the last year. Many of these end up in some of our country’s most beautiful regions – like Chile’s Atacama desert, which is being littered with fast fashion discards, which release toxic chemicals that seep into the fertile soil like a toxic sludge.
Hyperconsumerism is largely to blame for this, but so is our continued reliance on single use products, like paper towels, single use beauty items, and more. Our collective shopping habits have become so unhinged that it’s having a serious global impact, and we’re throwing out clothing, food packaging, personal care items, beauty products, and more at record rates.
Capitalism, which is at the core of this problem, is here to stay whether we like it or not. But one type of solution may be closer and more personal than you think; it lies in the resourceful lifestyles of our abuelas and other señoras of your family tree. Their sustainable, low-waste habits were once a normal part of life in Latin America, passed down through generations until marketing and mass produced products rendered them outdated. These practices, deeply ingrained in our heritage and born out of necessity, are more relevant today than ever. And there’s so much we can learn from them.
So what happened in our global history that put us in this critical and urgent position?
The TikTok Shop And Fast Fashion
Read more
Boston College scholar and spending expert Julian Schor traces consumerism’s roots back to the 1920s with the rise of consumer goods, where we started to mass produce cheaply made products. Consumerism surged again in the 1950s postwar era when the federal government encouraged mass production across various industries to fuel economic growth. During the materialistic 1980’s, spending was all about keeping up with the Joneses, and then the pandemic of the 2020’s ushered in a shopping explosion, because people were ready to shop after a year of marinating at home, fingers glued to their iPhones.
Hyperconsumerism was put on steroids with the rise of influencer marketing, where anyone with a large following promoted an endless amount of products, usually via TikTok shop. They were so good at it that it was making some people go into severe debt. Many of the people shilling for viral products were, essentially, directly profiting off of the amount of garbage they created. Back in my youth I remember there was a term for single use, disposable products that just took up space – cachureos.
TikTok’s “Underconsumption Core,” which started to trend around 2023, was a direct response to this. It was a critique of things like GRWM videos (“get ready with me”) where top influencers would go through their makeup and fashion styles, always followed by “link in bio” for purchase. In this ecosystem, creators shared tips on how to buy less and recycle more, live with less things, and live a “zero waste” lifestyle. The trend, alongside minimalism, has had a meteoric rise, with over 31 million videos published to date, and nearly 5,000 media articles covering its phenomenon.
There’s also a societal underside to conspicuous spending; It exacerbates structural, and economic inequality by encouraging unsustainable levels of consumption that disproportionately benefit wealthy corporations, often at the expense of marginalized communities and poor people. People start to feel pressured to spend beyond their means to fit societal expectations, creating a toxic cycle of debt and poverty.
Your Abuela Was an Underconsumption and Multipurpose Queen Before it Was Cool
Read more
While social media influencers present underconsumption as novel, you have likely felt a tinge of familiarity when watching their videos. You see, the señoras in your family have long been practicing sustainability out of necessity and cultural tradition for hundreds of years starting with the Indigenous People that owned the land, to your post-war great grandmothers. The forgotten history of their own “underconsumption core” is more relevant than ever today.
These women would look at the daily Amazon boxes arriving at your doorstep and cringe.
The typical day-to-day life of our Latin American great grandmothers and grandmothers included habits that you can use today to take yourself out of the toxic habit of generating massive amounts of waste, as well as the mindset to think more “multipurpose”.
Some Easy First Steps To Start No Waste Living
#1 – Say No To Single Use Waste
Single use products are a burden to our global health, and nothing is more rage-inducing than paper towels. In 1907, Arthur Scott, the heir to Scott Paper Company, came across a practical use for leftover scraps from the factory’s toilet paper production, which led to the creation of disposable paper towels. This accidental discovery eventually changed household cleaning habits forever, but it also created an awful lot of trash. These towels are very hard to recycle (unless they’re recyclable) or compost since they’re often contaminated with waste or chemicals. This invention didn’t travel to Latin America until the 1990s, when big paper corporations started heavy marketing campaigns there. Up until then, your ancestral señoras used kitchen towels and trapos for everything, and they wouldn’t have been caught dead mopping up a stain using paper. Getting the entire household used to using kitchen towels is a game changer. You’ll not only spend less money on paper towels, but you’ll rid your household of 45 pounds of paper waste every year.
Your abuelas also used one bar of soap for multiple uses. In fact, if you go further back in time, each family had their own secret recipe for making soap that could be used all over the house – for washing dishes to washing laundry. Another type of soap, which señoras made using herbs and tinctures, could be used on your hair, face, or body. Their bathrooms were not littered with multiple products, because multipurpose use was king.
#2 Reuse Containers Like A Señora
It may be embarrassing to reuse tomato and pickle jars, but this is how your post-war abuela generated very little trash. She cooked most of the family’s meals from scratch and thus had less of a need for groceries that came in containers. But when she did, she reused every bit of material. She reused old cookie tins, food containers and used glass jars to store food and ferment things from her garden. In some cities in Latin America, it was also common to see a man riding a bicycle through your neighborhood collecting bottles in return for pesos. What can you do? It’s as easy as using boiling water to remove a glass container’s label and adding it to your pantry. Or seek out bottle recycling services in your area. For example, California has a website where you can find shops that will take and give you money for containers. Your pantry may not look pretty, but reusing just one glass jar 20 times results in 94% fewer carbon emissions compared to recycling it after a single use. Use large glass jars to store veggies or leftovers or sauces, or ferment new things, and glass juice bottles for your smoothies.
#3 Avoid Fast Fashion
Señoras of the past rarely threw away clothes. Instead, they handed them down to younger family members, mended holes or rips, and patched up anything unseemly.
But clothing was made differently back then; It was well-made, and created in small batches, using materials like cotton, wool, and silk. It was often tailor-made or made by someone in the family using sewing patterns. Today’s fashion is mass-produced, fast, and often uses materials like plastic-based nylon, and petroleum-based polyester, which take hundreds of years to break down in landfills.
How can you emulate this without breaking the bank? If you don’t already, learn how to mend like your abuela, and stop throwing away clothing. Avoid buying clothes at places that are well-known producers of fast fashion. A good rule of thumb is to buy clothes made from cotton, wool or silk and other “slow materials”. Try to buy good, quality fashion and accessories.
Keeping Our Traditions Alive
Read more
The big irony is that corporate marketing to Latin America made these traditional practices obsolete, replacing single use, small batch home and kitchen products, made with natural materials like glass. In its place were mass-produced, disposable products made from cheap materials like plastic and polyester, which take hundreds of years to degrade and sit in the landfill for generations. I can almost guarantee you that your great grandmother from the rancho generated zero waste, through her own ways of recycling, reusing, using only multipurpose products, and making many things herself.
We’re facing a massive waste crisis, with landfills overflowing and corporations dumping trash in our cherished homelands. This is already leading to environmental and health risks that will only worsen over time. While efforts to address the issue exist, progress needs to be faster. For example, the United Nations’ Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes is an international agreement that’s aiming to reduce cross national waste. There are also national bans by Latin American countries like Mexico and El Salvador that will hopefully soon ban the practice. Some countries like Colombia are even putting into effect circular economy infrastructures that reduce waste.
In the meantime, we can all make small, impactful changes in our daily routines to reduce waste and lessen the strain on our waste systems, paving the way for a more sustainable future here and in your ancestral homelands, while at the same time reconnecting with our culture and our family roots.
Ann Dunning is the author of Radical Señora Era: Ancestral Latin American Secrets For A Healthier, Happier Life, and the co-founder of Latina beauty line Vamigas.