Networked sustainable lifestyle activism: growth and limits of zero waste movement in urban China

ABSTRACT

How do citizens express environmentalism and lead sustainable change in an authoritarian country like China, where contentious political civic actions have limited saliency? Can we re-imagine what forms of citizen action build ’environmental movement’ in this socio-political context? Based on 41 in-depth interviews and seven months of participant observations in China’s zero waste community, this article proposes networked sustainable lifestyle activism as an important form of environmental movement in China’s socio-political context. Drawing on lifestyle movement (Haenfler et al. 2012) and sustainable materialism (Schlosberg 2019) theories, I analyze the growth, characteristics, and limitations of the zero waste movement in China. It consists of sustainable lifestyle activism that adopts lifestyle change for broader sustainability, pursues anti-consumerism authentic identity and well-being as a site of change, and grows through social media and informal networks. Meanwhile, the movement goes beyond individual lifestyle change as networks of secondhand material flow and collective, non-contentious environmental actions. Difficulties to promote widespread, thorough sustainable lifestyle change and constrained political engagement are important factors that limit the movement’s effects. My research contributes to the literature on new environmental movements, theoretical discussion of environmental movements in China, and empirical understanding of civic environmental actions in this socio-political context.

KEYWORDS:

• Zero waste movement
• lifestyle movement
• urban China
• sustainable lifestyle
• sustainable materialism
• environmental movement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Community refers not a place-based neighborhood but an abstract network of people who share interests and provide mutual support.

2. A Chinese mobile phone app that serves multiple functions including instant messaging, social media, payment. It’s the world’s largest stand alone mobile app.

3. There is no available information on other environmental organization’s WeChat account followers, though.

4. Social enterprise is an organization that operates on a business model but has serving social or environmental well-being as its main objective. It is different from non-profit or NGO.

5. The founder of GoZero Waste didn’t mention their intention to register as NGO, probably given the difficulty of registration in China (J. Lu & Steinhardt, 2022).

6. The survey is not a focus of analysis in this article. I use the demographic information and select questions that provide context for the zero waste lifestyle movement.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Yale University.

Notes on contributors

Danning Lu

Danning Lu is an environmental social science researcher from China. She holds MSc in environmental science from Yale University, BA in sociology and BS in environmental science from Wheaton College (IL). Her work focuses on the why and how of social change toward environmental sustainability, with particular interests in grassroots environmentalism, sustainable behaviors, and policies. Lu has researched community gardens in urban China, zero waste lifestyle movement, and climate change public perception as well as policy support in the United States and China. She is pursuing a PhD in development studies at Cornell University, with research focus on waste governance, plastic consumption, and circularity.