PARTIALITY AND AFFECT: BUILDING BLOCKS OF ZERO WASTE LIFESTYLES IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Waste, though visceral, is rarely seen as a point of interest as it is often avoided and neglected. Amidst rising global consumer consciousness of the effects of plastic waste pollution on the environmental and impacting climate change, waste is emerging as a notable problem of the modern society. To counter this, individuals have taken to individualise responsibility and consciously choose to reduce their consumption and consequently, waste. Zero waste lifestyles are recent phenomenon that has only come to fore in the past decade and have not garnered much research. In Singapore, the entrenched and dominant mindset of a throwaway society that prizes convenience and efficiency stands in direct contrast to the principles of zero waste lifestyles. As such, the fact that this lifestyle is gathering interest in Singapore in the recent years is cause for study. Through semi-structured interviews, this thesis aims to understand zero waste lifestyles from the perspective of zero waste individuals, to discern the physical practices of living zero waste and the everyday experiences of living an unconventional lifestyle in an environment that does not completely support it. As consumption spaces and practices are physical manifestations of this inherent incongruence between the lifestyle and environment, most of analysis is centred there. Current literature on ethical consumption tends to conceptualise subjects as consumers. The thesis counters this partial analysis of people and instead adopts a humanistic and phenomenological approach to studying these zero waste individuals in their personal and subjective capacities to explicate the ‘lived worlds’ of experience that they encounter in living zero waste. This thesis argues that zero waste individuals are heterogenous and necessarily partial and situated in their practices. Affect and emotions play a significant role in allowing the individual to derive meaning from their practices and to sustain them in the long term.