Growing awareness of environmental issues and their relation to consumption patterns has givenrise to calls for sustainable consumption across the globe. In this article, we focus on the zerowaste... Show moreGrowing awareness of environmental issues and their relation to consumption patterns has givenrise to calls for sustainable consumption across the globe. In this article, we focus on the zerowaste lifestyle movement, which targets high-consumption households in the Global North as asite of change for phasing out waste in global supply chains. Our article is concerned with askinghow gender and household sustainability are mutually constituted in the zero waste lifestylemovement. We establish an analytical tension between understanding zero waste living as afurther intensification of feminised responsibility for people and the planet and as offering potentialfor transformational change – as feminised concern or feminist care. Through qualitative contentanalysis of the 10 most influential zero waste blogs globally, we show how the five zero wasterules of conduct – refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, and rot – guide consumers towards everydayand situated engagements with waste. Organised by three cross-cutting themes – communingwith nature, organising time, and spending money – we present the normativities these rules callinto being for reconfiguring domestic activities such as cooking, cleaning, and grocery shopping. Inthe discussion, we draw out the implications of zero waste living’s emerging, contradictory gendernormativities, while recalling the political economy in which it is situated, namely a neoliberal,postfeminist landscape. We identify a continued feminisation of domestic responsibilities that isuncontested in zero waste living but also explore the progressive potential of waste-free livingto bring collective, naturecultural worlds into being as part of domestic environmental labour. Show less
