Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Zero Waste On Instagram Through The Lens Of Precautionary Consumption, Michelle Murphy

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

The zero waste community (ZW) community on Instagram is a group of individuals who intend to lessen their environmental impact by utilizing precautionary consumption (PC) to avoid generating waste. Public figures in the ZW community advertise ZW as a simple and efficient method to take action against the ever growing plastic waste in our society. In this paper, I perform a virtual ethnographic analysis of posts shared on Instagram within the ZW community to illustrate the way in which ZW places responsibility at the individual level in order to reduce plastic waste. Next, I compare levels of industrial waste to …