With the luxury of domestic help stripped away, we are now taking more ownership of things like leftover scraps after we chop and peel vegetables. "There's greater  intimacy with our food and home because earlier, we weren't in contact with such day-to-day waste," says Saher Mansoor of Bare Necessities, an organisation that promotes a zero-waste lifestyle, ahead of a webinar where she will talk about tricks aimed at achieving that end.

Mansoor says that she is going to break the event down into different sessions with subjects including clothing choices, travel, workplace habits and home-care routines. One example she gives is to simply consider our use of plastic toothbrushes. These will be around for about 300 years after we dump them because that's how long it takes the earth to get completely rid of a piece of plastic.