Her Story
"When I came back to India in 2015, I felt overwhelmed with India’s trash problem. I was confronted by it every day- seeing piles of garbage on the streets and I spent time with local waste pickers and watched them sort through waste with their bare hands. I started to think of the environmental, health and social justices issues associated with our garbage problem. I wanted to stop being part of the problem. I knew I had to address my own trash problem first. My solution was to live a lifestyle that best reflects the values I cared about. I had called myself an environmentalist for about six years at the time. I decided I needed to live a life fully congruent to my environmental and social justice values. I needed to walk the talk and I knew I had to start living a zero-waste lifestyle.
In my zero-waste journey, I realized that it was impossible to find personal care and home care products that didn’t contain harmful chemicals and weren’t packaged in plastic. In response to this problem,I wanted to create a company that mirrored the values of zero waste, ethical consumption and sustainability. I wanted to make it easy for other people looking to consume more mindfully and to encourage others to produce less waste. And Bare Necessities was born in 2016!
The thing about trash is that we are so caught up in this web of convenience that we don’t think about our personal trash and often attribute it to a larger global problem that we have no control over. The only time we think about trash is when we see or smell it stinking up our neighborhood.
Amy Korst rightly said, “Trash is intimately connected to every environmental problem we face today, from climate change and habitat destruction to water pollution and chemical exposure. It’s also intensely personal and impacts every decision in our daily lives, including everything from how much money we spend to how much weight we gain”.
My go to resources when I started off my zero waste journey was Bea Johnson and Lauren Singe’s blog but most importantly were conversations with my grandma asking her what she did before shampoo started being sold in a plastic bottle? A lot of our Indian traditions are actually rooted in ecological practices or what we now can call “zero waste practices''. Our stainless steel indian “tiffin” is another example of an Indian tradition that is celebrated by the zero waste movement. It has its origin from 18th century British India, it involves a whole range of dishes and equipment and above all of suppliers, the tiffin wallahs of Bombay. This to me is an exemplary example of zero waste creating 5,000+ jobs, and supporting community health by delivering home cooked meals to over 2 lakh people – all without producing any trash!
Bare Necessities started in the pursuit of zero waste living and living a lifestyle congruent to my own values. I felt overwhelmed with India’s trash problem. I was confronted by it every day seeing piles of garbage on the streets. I spent time with local waste pickers and watched them sort through waste with their bare hands. I started to think of the environmental, health and social justice issues associated with our garbage problem.
I wanted to stop being part of the problem. My solution was to live a lifestyle that best reflects the values I cared about. In my zero-waste journey, I realized that it was impossible to find personal care and home care products that didn’t contain harmful chemicals and weren’t packaged in plastic. In response to this problem,I wanted to create a company that mirrored the values of zero waste, ethical consumption and sustainability. I wanted to make it easy for other people looking to consume more mindfully and to encourage others to produce less waste. And Bare Necessities was born on July 16, 2016" "1. Curiosity - to be okay with unlearning and learning new information.
Resilience - Us humans, we are made from pretty resilient stuff. So let no one tell you what you can and cannot do. Be bold in your imagination and create the most vivid and beautiful life for yourself. After all, we are the authors of our stories. We can physically, emotionally, mentally heal from anything and defy all socially constructed notions of what our life should look like!
Imagination - to re-image a different way of being! In my case I am excited to re-image a cleaner, greener more just world.
