“People hear about me, and they think ‘she must live in a tree and have armpit hair,’” Lauren Singer says. “But you don’t have to be a hippie to do this.”

Singer, who runs the lifestyle blog Trash is for Tossers, is sitting in her plastic-free, zero waste Brooklyn apartment eating a donut she got at the corner bakery. While she could easily be mistaken for a typical 24-year-old, she isn’t.

Singer is also CEO and founder of an environmentally friendly cleaning supplies company called The Simply Co. — and she hasn’t produced any waste since 2012.

Singer has all of her garbage from the past four years in a single mason jar that she keeps in a kitchen cabinet. She composts, recycles and repurposes items – which Singer calls “upcycling.” She doesn’t send anything to a landfill and no, she doesn't hand waste off to friends with a wink saying “hey, don’t tell anyone.”

While Singer had been an active participant in the New York City environmental community during most of her undergraduate time at New York University — organizing protests, lobbying in front of politicians — it wasn't until her senior year that she changed her lifestyle to align with her beliefs. When taking an environmental studies capstone course to complete her major, she noticed a classmate came in each day with lunch in a plastic bag. The classmate would eat it with a plastic knife and fork, and then throw everything out.

“That’s when I realized there was a disconnect between our individual actions and what we were learning,” Singer says.

She too had a refrigerator brimming with plastic-packed items. So she decided to make a change, and slowly made the transition to being totally waste-free. In 2012, she launched Trash is for Tossers to detail her journey.

According to the EPA, Americans produce just under 4.5 pounds of waste on average each day, which means that Americans send roughly 220 million tons of waste to landfills each year. Not to mention the massive trash vortex in the Pacific that is now roughly the size of Texas.

Singer isn’t alone in her commitment to reduce her waste.

In the 90s, the EPA encouraged the concept of what they called “precycling,” which is now a full-fledged trend. The New York Times recently reported on the anti-packaging movement, which has gained popularity in Europe and led to a slew of waste-free grocery stores in Germany, Italy, Spain and more. But it exists in the United States as well. For example, Whole Foods has sections where customers can buy dry goods like rice, nuts and dried fruit in bulk.

Singer says that her inspiration to live a zero waste lifestyle stemmed from Bea Johnson, a native of France who now leads a trash-free existence in California and runs the blog Zero Waste Home. Her motto is "refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot." Johnson has been zero waste since 2008 and has two kids to boot.

For Singer, being waste-free means using a mason jar instead of a to-go coffee cup. She replaced her plastic cooking utensils with wooden ones, traded her shampoo bottle for unpackaged bar soap and ditched her tampons for a Lunette cup. It also means bringing a cloth napkin with her when she wants a street taco, and asking waiters to not bring her a plastic straw with her drink. When she and I go to a café near her apartment, the waitress already knows to serve her order without a paper napkin.

Singer also donates items others would toss in the trash and avoids plastic at all costs. While others buy rice, granola, sugar, flour in plastic packages, Singer lugs a linen bag full of mason jars to Whole Foods (or any other store that offers dry goods in bulk) and fills them directly from the dispenser.

When Singer adopted this lifestyle, she realized she couldn’t buy many of the cleaning and beauty products that she had once used because of their plastic packaging (not to mention the not-so-environmentally-friendly chemicals). So she decided to make her own, and soon was posting videos on YouTube and her blog to help others learn how to make their own products, as well.

Singer makes her toothpaste using coconut oil, baking soda and essential oil. But she also makes body butter, deodorant, and of course, laundry detergent.

The more she posted, the more positive feedback she received.

“People [started] asking me what products in stores were the same quality as the ones I was making myself,” Singer remembers.

So she went to the store and found beauty products she could recommend to her readers, but couldn’t find any cleaning products that she could get behind. In response, Singer launched a Kickstarter page, and raised over $40,000 to start her company. Soon, she had to ship out over 1,000 jars from Kickstarter alone. But the Kickstarter money only funded the company, it wouldn't cover her living expenses.

Luckily, Singer had saved a chunk of money to live on, and as word got around about her lifestyle, she was able to get paid speaking engagements and she had some income from advertisements on Trash is for Tossers. So she she quit her day job as a sustainability manager at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and by herself, filled hundreds of glass jars with laundry detergent in her kitchen. She completed 830 orders in the first 30 days.

 “I was a factory,” she says. “I didn’t sleep for like nine months.”

Singer says she would put a record on, combine the ingredients and load them into jars before carting them across the room. From there, she'd place them all into recycled boxes, protect them with recyclable packing materials, and hold them together with paper tape in order to keep her company fully zero waste.

When Singer became too overwhelmed, she took on two team members who work remotely, and moved the production to a factory in Ohio. She says she checks in on production regularly to make sure they’re staying trash-free. Singer hopes to release an all-purpose cleaner and an all-purpose soap in the next 6 to 8 months, and she says that soon The Simply Co. will be able to lower its price point, in order to be more in line with competitors' prices.

The truth is, a totally zero waste lifestyle may not be broadly applicable — it certainly helps to be young, self-employed and sufficiently well-off to obtain and maintain this lifestyle. But that doesn’t mean that Singer isn’t doing something profoundly important, even though it may be difficult or nearly impossible for many. But Singer doesn't blame individuals for that.

"We're all just existing in this culture of consumerism," Singer says. "I can't fault people — it's the way society is set up."

Singer says she started living this lifestyle to be fully aligned with her beliefs, and while she says she would never ask everyone to go waste-free, she does hope her choices will make others reflect on their own consumption.

“Regardless of who you are, you can reduce your trash a little bit – it’s not a political issue. Just do one thing,” Singer says. “Just start.”