Decreasing your waste output isn’t as hard as you might think.

When you search for “zero-waste living,” perfect, Instagram-style images of a year’s worth of garbage in a single mason jar are likely to pop to the top of your results — a neat snapshot of what has long been both a waste designation for municipalities and businesses and a practice of reducing, reusing, recycling in communities around the world since the beginning of humankind.

“The modern term, ‘zero-waste’ started out as a business certification,” Kathryn Kellogg, the founder of Going Zero Waste, an author and a well-known influencer in the zero-waste movement. “It meant a 90 percent divertment of trash from a landfill. The goal behind it is to completely write waste out of existence. Yet, there’s more to waste than what we just put in our trash can,” she says.

Find out more about how you can go zero waste regardless of where you live or how much money you make by reading my story over at Shondaland.