About a year ago, the layoffs from federal funding cuts began to hit the Triangle. The Trump administration’s disinvestment in science and environmental protections, including the dismantling of a significant Environmental Protection Agency office in Research Triangle Park, has been staggering.
Against this backdrop, you might be thinking about what steps you can personally take to reduce harm to the environment. Maybe you ride a bike for exercise, but are intimidated by bicycle commuting. Perhaps you have plateaued in your efforts to reduce how much you’re buying that comes neatly packaged in seemingly unavoidable plastic. Or maybe you’d like to be less reliant on Big Energy and more in sync with nature, but aren’t sure where to start.
Not everyone has the luxury of going without a car by choice, or seeking out a grocery store that lets you bring your own refillable containers. But for readers looking to reduce their environmental impact in their everyday lives, we wanted to get insight from locals who have done it: What prompted them to make these commitments to sustainability? And how, exactly, do they live out their values day-to-day?
There are so many people in the Triangle making strides to reduce their own environmental impacts and build a greener world. Here, you’ll find profiles of three of them: Marc Maximov, who has navigated the Bull City without a car for 20-plus years while advocating for bicycle-friendly policies and infrastructure as a Bike Durham board member; Louise Omoto Kessel, an artist, storyteller, and veteran of off-grid living helping people of all ages experience the benefits of a life closer to nature at Clapping Hands Farm in Pittsboro; and Kathleen Liebowitz, executive director of Cary-based Toward Zero Waste, who’s leading efforts to reduce waste in her own household and across Wake County.
Ten years ago, when Kathleen Liebowitz was in her mid-40s with two children in elementary school, she decided to downsize from her single-family home to a condo roughly half its size in Raleigh.
By all accounts, she’d achieved the American Dream: She was a married mother of two and a homeowner and could afford a lot of luxuries. But when Liebowitz looked around at her life, “there was just no meaning in all this excessiveness,” she said.
“I just said, ‘We’re making changes,’” Liebowitz recalled. “Within the next three years, we sold our house and downsized to a much smaller condo … and we just really changed a lot of how we did things.”
Liebowitz—now executive director of North Carolina nonprofit Toward Zero Waste (TZW)—got rid of more than half the stuff in her house. It turned out to be a relief.
“I never missed any of it,” Liebowitz said. “So now, getting rid of stuff doesn’t scare me at all. I don’t feel I’m gonna miss out on something.”
Liebowitz’s blueprint for her family’s new life was Bea Johnson’s 2013 book Zero Waste Home, which describes how the author’s family of four reduced their waste to fit into one jar. Liebowitz hasn’t quite reached that milestone, but at one point she was able to cut down her family’s waste to about 6 pounds per month.
That’s a huge accomplishment given that the average Wake County resident produces about 5.3 pounds of waste per day. For a family of four, per month, that adds up to more than 100 times the waste Liebowitz’s family produced.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, avoiding purchasing new items, avoiding packaging, and reusing what you can helps save energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and preserve the natural world. It also reduces the amount of trash sent to landfills. Wake County’s only active landfill is expected to be full by 2045, possibly sooner.
But since the “trash jar” fad took over social media in the 2010s, environmental activists have pointed out (fairly) that fitting all your trash in a jar is an unrealistic goal, requiring the kind of time, money, and privilege that many people don’t have.
Liebowitz likewise recognizes that some of the changes she’s made aren’t possible for everyone—one of the first things visitors see upon navigating to the TZW website is the statement that being zero waste “isn’t about fitting all your trash in a jar.”
While the nonprofit started as a local community movement to help people reduce their personal waste, Liebowitz said the organization is now more focused on partnering with businesses, schools, and governments to create more widespread change.
In 2025, TZW kept 475,000 polystyrene lunch trays out of the Wake County landfill by working with nine Wake County schools to use compostable fiber trays instead.
The nonprofit also saved 199,000 food items from landfills through its food recovery program last year. Instead of throwing away unwanted or unopened food items, students donated them to a central pantry, where other students could pick them up. The program is now running in 27 Wake elementary and middle schools, according to TZW.
Liebowitz said composting was one of the biggest factors in reducing her personal waste. About 37 percent of the waste that goes into the South Wake Landfill is compostable, she said, referencing Wake County’s landfill study.
Today, Leibowitz has joined forces with her neighbors to collect food scraps and hand them off to a compost collection service, The ReCollective. Between the five of them, they each pay about $10 per month, Liebowitz said. It’s a good option for eco-minded people who live in apartments or condos like Liebowitz, but it is an extra expense. Still, composting is “the absolute easiest thing to reduce your waste,” she said.
Wake County offers backyard compost bins at a discount each May, but if you don’t have a backyard, you can also drop your compost off for free at different locations in Wake and Durham counties. TZW has also worked to create additional drop-off points in Cary and at the Midtown Farmers’ Market.
Liebowitz has also stopped using disposable products that are staples in many homes, like paper towels. For toiletries and cleaning supplies, she visits refillable stores, where she can get the necessities without buying new plastic containers. The same holds true for certain food items, like tea, coffee, pasta, grains, and spices. In Cary, there’s the Mindful Merchant, while in Durham, you could visit Fillaree or Part and Parcel.
“I’ve been using the same containers for more than 10 years,” Liebowitz said.
Old clothes get patched or donated to secondhand stores, while broken electronics go to Anything with a Plug Recycling. And on a daily basis, Liebowitz avoids buying new things. The last major purchase her family made was a TV, she said, when their old one literally caught fire.
Avoiding plastic food packaging has been the hardest to manage, Liebowitz said. She encourages people interested in reducing their waste to “just find one little thing and see if you can change that behavior.”
“It might take you six months,” she said. “And if you fail it in a little while, give it a try again. I’ve been doing a lot of this for 12 years, and there are still some times I buy stuff that probably is not earth-friendly. But OK, I’ll do better next time.”
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