【GYLD Talk】Olesia Ermakova: Trying a Zero Waste Lifestyle

【GYLD Talk】Olesia Ermakova: Trying a Zero Waste Lifestyle

Hello dear participants and guests of the GYLD Annual Forum. My name is Olesia Ermakova and I’m a Chief Marketing Officer at SCHOLAR. But today I won’t be talking about media and marketing. I will be talking about our daily efforts we can make on the way to sustainable development and having a more greener world.

And now I would like you all to look at this picture and try to guess what it is. No one knows probably. This is the jar, this the trash produced by one family of four people. Here they are and the dogs within one year. This woman in the photo is Bea. Johnson and she is the initiator of the Global Zero Waste movement. The Johnson family lives in California and their mom Bea. Johnson guided her whole family to become as close to zero waste lifestyle as possible. And the whole family is on that journey for already 15 years. And in 2017, you can see the pictures here, she also visited China and encouraged as many people as possible to try leaving a zero waste lifestyle.

And now look at me. Do you know how my blouse look like before? Probably no one knows. It looked exactly like that. And do you know how my skirt look like before? I didn’t get the pictures here, but I made this new clothes from the old ones and now they look much better, right? Don’t they? I enjoy sewing for almost 14 years of my life which is a literally half of my life and but not everyone has to sew in order to reduce waste and here for example you can see the pictures of the bags I also made from the old clothes and I spent for this just one hour and everyone can make just the same because like the waste is enormous. And annually 500 billion plastic bags we used every year worldwide and one meter and plastic bags are used every minute and by my assumption and estimation I just have feedbacks like that I already managed to saved and to replace these about 800 plastic bags and this is my little impact on the sustainable development. And this waste was just not created.

And we make conscious decisions and choices about our education, which university to attend and which major to apply for, which industry and company to work for. But why don’t you make the same conscious decisions when it comes to consumption and buying? And how do we even make these choices? And are these choices made by ourselves or other made by companies instead of us? Research says that 95% of buying decisions are made on an unconscious level. It means that we probably even didn’t want the thing we bought like a couple of weeks ago, like two days ago, yesterday or even today morning.

And our common issue is that we are always waiting for someone to come and solve our issues, lead either government, businesses, companies are the members of society. But I believe that the solution lies in us and the change starts from us. And our daily decisions have the accumulative power when we repeat them every day.

Today you haven’t wasted one plastic cup . Maybe like tomorrow it’s already like several. And in one year it would be thousands. And it’s always better to have like 100 people who are trying a little bit every day to leave a zero waste lifestyle than just to have one person who is perfect in zero waste and more isn’t necessarily a good thing. And by refusing from what we don’t need, these can start to value what we already have much more. And thank you so much and hope that everyone would join this movement even for a little bit every day.

Thank You.

  About Speaker  

Olesia Ermakova is a Chief Marketing Officer of SCOLAR, a youth initiative platform headquartered in Beijing, bringing together young leaders from the SCO region through joint projects in the fields of education, entrepreneurship, and culture. Olesia studied at Peking University and Communication University of China. She has been involved in volunteering for the past 10 years and volunteered for the UN. Olesia’s inspiration is creating opportunities for the youth through her participation in the Chinese tech giant Tencent THINC Fellowship and the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community. Olesia also works in international cooperation and promotes cutting-edge technologies and innovations in China, focusing on the new energy and sustainability. In 2020, she was invited as a guest speaker for the UN Conference on Biological Diversity COP 15 in Kunming.