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Nikki Smith, an IT worker from Columbus, Ohio, was excited to find the r/ZeroWaste subreddit. Always a bit of an environmentalist, in recent years she became more serious about doing everything she could to reduce her carbon footprint. She dove head first into the online community, eagerly adopting tips like making reusable cotton rounds out of old or ill-fitting clothes.

Beyond those gems, though, a certain kind of post has irked her.

“I kept seeing post after post after post of people sharing photos and info on ‘look at these zero-waste things I just bought!’” Smith says over email. “It just boiled me long enough that I had to speak up.”

So, after a few weeks of seeing more posts like this than usual — maybe due to more new folks recently joining the subreddit — she made a post urging people to stop buying zero-waste things, arguing that these purchases are part of the problem.

“A lot of these items were ordered online with unrecyclable packaging, and then [there’s] fuel emissions from shipping,” she says. “And a lot of these items I kept thinking probably could have been found second-hand somewhere. Water bottles especially! They’re everywhere.”

She’s not the only one on the subreddit with that sentiment. On posts where users show hauls of glass jars from big-box stores like Walmart, commenters chime in to suggest that next time they should check their local thrift stores first. One Redditor shared that they sewed their own drawstring bag for travel utensils and received particular praise. “See, this is nice,” the top comment reads. “You didn’t miss the whole point and buy fancy new bamboo cutlery when you already had metal stuff at home that would work perfectly well.”

The market for earth-friendly products is ever-growing. In 2018, the reusable water bottle market was valued at more than $8 billion, up 3 percent from 2017, and it’s expected to reach $10.4 billion by 2025. The global eco fiber market, like bamboo fabric and organic cotton harvested without the use of pesticides or other chemicals, is anticipated to reach $93 billion by 2025. The green packaging market — think reusable food containers, along with packaging made of recycled materials or materials that break down naturally — will reportedly grow to $215 billion by 2021.

Companies are now marketing to the green consumer, and though there are clear environmental benefits to this, some zero wasters are concerned that this push to buy green products ignores those other two Rs of the environmentalist mantra: reduce and reuse.

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Wooden cutlery, mason jars, and reusable cups are just a few of the zero-waste products on the market. Getty Images

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