Going Through the Trash (On Purpose): Anna Sacks on Reinvention, Waste, and Systemic Change

What do investment banking, a Jewish farming fellowship, and New York City's trash have in common? For Anna Sacks, known to hundreds of thousands of followers as The Trash Walker, they're all stops on the winding road to her life's work.

 In this episode, Anna shares the honest story of her career search: the years of trying art galleries, finance, and rotations through a confusing resume before she discovered what she calls "inherently meaningful work" - waste reduction, composting advocacy, and corporate accountability.

 We talk about what it looks like to build credibility without a cohesive resume, how going through trash led to legislative wins worth millions of dollars to New York City's composting infrastructure, and why she believes the most powerful thing ordinary people can do right now happens at the local level and not the federal one.

 Anna is thoughtful, funny, and deeply honest about the ways her path worked out and the ways it didn't. This is a conversation about non-linear careers, the cost of meaningful work, and what it means to stay in a fight even when you're not sure it's working.

 Follow Anna on Instagram: @thetrashwalker

Watch the documentary: Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy streaming on Netflix.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Only you can know what's meaningful to you. And every person I think has a different path. You can tell when when you're experiencing meaningful work and where you're in flow, where you lose track of time, where you're absorbed in what you're doing and you're kind of loving it. And this is something that I could spend my every day doing. I think that that's ultimately what people are seeking when they're looking for meaningful work.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Hi everyone and welcome to Pathbound, the podcast about the real, messy, unexpected journeys that lead us to the work we love. I'm Monica Argendona, and every week I talk with someone whose story proves there's no single right way to build a meaningful life. Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me today. I am genuinely excited to introduce you to someone who has built one of the most original and meaningful careers I've come across. Anna Sachs, better known online as the Trash Walker, grew up on the upper west side of New York City. She studied East Asian languages at Northwestern and Columbia, spent time in Beijing and Singapore, and then landed in the world that many ambitious New Yorkers find themselves in, investment banking. But the work never felt inherently meaningful. That phrase became her North Star. Anna walked away from finance and participated in a Jewish farming fellowship in Connecticut that changed everything. She started doing something almost no one else would consider doing walking the streets of New York City, going through the trash, and showing the world what we're throwing away. What followed was years of advocacy, legislative wins, viral moments that force corporations like Coach and Starbucks to respond, and a new role at Beyond Plastics. Anna's story is one of the clearest examples I've heard of what happens when you stop trying to justify your work and start doing work that you can't stop thinking about. Let's get started. So I'm just gonna jump right in if you don't mind. And so I'd like to start just by asking kind of a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and kind of what kind of kid were you?

SPEAKER_01 2:00

I grew up in New York City on the Upper West Side where I still live. And I actually recently rediscovered these report cards or like whatever progress reports from when I was in nursery. And there was a line in it where it says that Anna does not like waste and like with arson crops would use the scrap paper and like integrate it into my art. So I think that since since then I like I've always kind of hated to see things go to waste. Yeah, as a kid, I I think a lot of my core personality was established. I think a lot of who I am is the same person I was then. I became a vegetarian when I was four. After I learned that chicken was made from the animal chicken, I stopped eating meat. I yeah, I loved puzzles, I loved playing with friends, I loved the stories and books. I think so, yeah, I think a lot of my core identities were established then.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

I love that you early on did not like waste. That is that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Yeah, I was so shocked to see that. I was like, this is like I didn't think of, I thought that this was a rec more recent development. I thought it happens, you know, more in when I was in middle school and I love thrifting and stuff like that. I didn't realize like that went back that early.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

So when you were in high school and college, did you know what you wanted to do?

SPEAKER_01 3:26

No. My goal in high school was go to was to go to an Ivy League college or like a really good college. I went to a very intense all-girls school, and that was kind of the the shared goal among among everyone, I think. And then in college, I did I majored in East Asian languages and cultures, and I spent time in Asia a little bit. And yeah, I thought then maybe I would do something related to Asia actually. I thought, like, because I really enjoyed my time there. I did a a summer study abroad in Beijing, and then I interned in Singapore one summer, and I really yeah, I love I love the culture there. I love traveling there. So I thought that that's where maybe I would end up. So where did you end up? I post college, I did a series. My the big theme has been like this search for inherently meaningful work. And so post-college, I worked at a gallery in Paris for a little bit, like an internship there that does art roots or outsider art. And then I worked at a photography gallery in New York City. I did an internship there. And that was because I love photography also. And I thought that maybe that would be a career path, like being in the art world, working in a museum, working in a gallery. And I found that the day-to-day of that was more tedious than I wanted. It wasn't it, you know, it was more, yeah, just like administrative tasks. It was like I prefer going to a museum than like helping put the like do tasks to get that exhibition going, you know. And then I I worked at an investment bank for Asia-focused investment bank for a couple of years. And it was a really good learning experience. And I liked my colleagues a lot, and I liked a lot of aspects of the work too. It felt cool. Like I felt like I'm in these rooms with these decision makers and kind of in contrast to the administrative tasks that I was doing before, it's like I actually have some power, some say. Like I'm I'm in these meetings, I'm in the room, I'm helping with these mergers and acquisitions and capital raises, but the work was not inherently meaningful. Okay. So I would find roundabout ways to justify it. Like, okay, we're preventing this company from going bankrupt, and we're saving this heritage of over a hundred years, and we're saving all these jobs, and so we're preserving some like culture and history and jobs, but it wasn't in and of itself meaningful. And like that was that became my my litmus test. And I wanted to leave and did this retreat at this Jewish center called the Isabel Friedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, and found out about this Jewish farming fellowship called Adama, which was starting in like just a couple of weeks, the new cohort. And I applied for the fellowship and I quit my job within two weeks. And so, like, went very quickly from the investment bank to the farming.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

So going back a little bit, your internships in Singapore and Beijing, were they in finance? Like, how did you kind of transition into that?

SPEAKER_01 6:49

Well, the it was a summer study abroad in Beijing through I was in Northwestern at the time, so that was through Northwestern. And then the the summer internship in Singapore was through Colombia, because I transferred to Colombia. And then the East Asian, honestly, it was through family connections, the the the Investment Bank, where my brother had worked there before. And it did help, of course, that I had this background in East Asia also. Okay. But it was, I don't know if they would have hired me if it weren't for those family connections.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

And so you're there, and that's a big jump. You just quit your job. And I mean, were you unhappy, or was it just I want something more meaningful?

SPEAKER_01 7:29

I think it was both. You know, it was I had been there for a couple of years, and over time, the kind of sacrifices I had to make started to build. And I was upset that, you know, I would miss friends' birthday parties, or I would make plans, and then I would have to cancel at the last minute. And then I stopped making plans during the weekdays because I thought it's like I'm I'm just gonna have to cancel. So my social life really shrank. And I think it's easier when you have a strong why. If you're doing that sort of thing and you have a very strong why, I think you can sustain yourself. Like if the why was I'm eventually going to start my own private equity company or I'm eventually going to, you know, start my investment bank or whatever, like that's my ultimate goal. I but I didn't have that very strong why. You know, why am I making these sacrifices? You know, I'm I I also felt like this is a lot of I get frustrated when there is like artificial deadlines that feel forced and unnecessary, you know. So it's like we're not saving lives here. We're not, it's okay if this is like we don't have to work at this pace and it felt unnatural, you know. I like if if I were saving lives, I don't think I would have cared so much about like missing missing these personal milestones. But in the context of working in finance, I that the kind of the disconnect between the perceived gravity of the situation and the actual reality of the situation and what you're expected to do, what and sacrifice was was kind of too much for me.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Okay. So how was the farm experience? I loved it.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

It was very intense, but like in but it was intense in a good way where you know you would wake up at 6 a.m. and you would have chores and you would have we it was a Jewish farming fellowship. So we integrated Judaism a lot into it. We would have like avadat lev in the morning, which means like work of the heart, which was would sometimes be like silent meditation or sitting outside in nature or around and sometimes you would have a bonfire going and playing guitar and singing together, you know, next to the lake. And so it was like these beautiful rituals integrated into it. And but it was like it was very intense because you'd be up from till 6 a.m. and then going and doing like very full days, and then I would go to bed around like 9 p.m. because I'd be so exhausted, like physically and emotionally, and all the ways. But the three main pillars were intentional living and Jewish learning, and then the actual farming. And I would say actually learning in general, Jewish and environmental learning, both of those. So every day kind of integrated these different components, and it was very unique. We would have we all, most of us lived together and we would have weekly meetings and we would kind of try to live with intention. And that was, I had done Jewish communal living before in college, but this was a kind of different scale of it or different, it was more than just chores and like figuring out how can we live together and divide up these chores and make the house kind of flow. It was also what type of space do we want to be creating and what type of conversations do we want to be having, what type of events do we want to be putting on, and like how are we, you know, how is our emotional health and kind of like check-ins. So it was this really, yeah, it was really beautiful time. Like in all of us, one of the things that united us was that everyone was kind of like in transition or seeking, and it was a place for people to go during that period to help in some cases, like in mind redirect or in some place, in case some cases deepen where they already knew what they wanted to do, but wanted to go deeper into it. And I think that it had a very profound effect on me. And it has, I think that that sort of program, yeah, Adama, like and maybe similar programs also. Just like it has a very it can it can be transformative when you go into like these immersive programs and you you're able to take time and like really think about what type of life do you want to live. How long were you there? The program itself was three months through the fall, and then I stayed for the winter also. So I ended up staying around six months.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

So when you left, what what did you see yourself doing?

SPEAKER_01 11:42

One of the big things I was pursuing was compost after I left. So I compost became a North Star for me. And when people asked me what I wanted to do, I would say compost because I thought it was like this is so it was so radical, it was so transformational. It felt very ancient and mystical and natural and some like this missing link that I had never really learned about that made so much sense. And so I wanted to bring composting to New York City. That was big, a big goal of mine. And I spent a period afterwards really trying to figure out what to do. Like, how do I get into this waste world? And I was trying to avoid going back to school because I don't, I don't actually love school, and maybe it's just like intense school I don't love, but I didn't want to go get a master's. I also didn't want to have to spend money and possibly like put myself in debt to do that. And I didn't want to start from scratch, also. I felt like at that point in my career, I wanted something a little bit more than an entry-level job. And I had a confusing resume. So I wasn't a good candidate to get it to do something, to get a job, really. And I started doing things under my control. So I was volunteering at the nonprofit Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, helping do food rescue. And I did this master composting course at the Lower East Side Ecology Center. And I started, yeah, started going through the trash. Like that was more my curiosity of like what are we tossing? And then the impetus to create my social media around it was to create kind of a trail and to show that despite not not having the academic credentials and despite not having the cohesive resume, like this is something that I care about. And I started posting about waste issues and posting about what I was finding on my trash walk. And ultimately that did lead to a job at Think Zero, which is a waste reduction diversion consulting firm. But in the interim, it it took around a year to get there. And I was also teaching after school Hebrew for for a period, like during that, during that period, and applying for jobs and yeah, trying to do these different things. So it took it took some time to to like land to get land in the place where I wanted to land.

SPEAKER_00 14:13

So what what kept you going? I mean, you literally went through trash and you're posting it on social media. So you're creating a spot for yourself, but what kept you going? I mean, you had a year kind of piecing this together for a year.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

The obsession and the passion, because like this was the inherently meaningful work that I had been seeking. And the going through the trash, I mean, I was doing that anyways. I like once I returned from Adama, I started going on these trash walks in my neighborhood and like pulling out usable things and bringing them home. And so it wasn't that I was doing that just for social media. You know, social media definitely became a motivator to, you know, like let me let me find these things and then show people what I was finding. But I wouldn't have continued if I didn't, if I, if it wasn't a genuine passion and obsession of mine, and if it wasn't the work that that I had been seeking that felt inherently meaningful. And yeah, it just felt like this is where this is where I wanted to redirect my life. I don't, and like I'm done searching, kind of like I'm done. I don't need to try this path or that path. Like I had tried the photography thing, and I had tried the finance thing, and I had tried like other internships, and this is the one that I felt like this is the one that fed like I couldn't sleep at night because I was thinking about these type of things, you know. And also for me, I'm one of my big, I don't know if it's like a passion obsession and struggle, is my relationship to stuff and my love for things. And like this also, and then that's been present. Like I had mentioned the thrifting, like you know, since I was 11 years old, I've loved thrifting. I've loved going through like rummaging, going through piles of stuff, finding things. And this is an extension of that. And I've loved objects and felt, I feel like it's more a of like this Japanese sense of objects where they're more than just objects, you know, they can contain spirits. They're like part of this, the they're part of the spiritual world in some way. Like that they're they're not, it's not just a thing. There's there's something beyond it. And yeah, it's so I I felt that too. Like I would put a lot of emotional weight onto things for better or worse. And this was a continuation of of that, but in a way that felt more meaningful. Yeah, definitely more meaningful than than just thrifting. I felt like this is something that is operating on so many different different levels, you know, the the avoidance of waste and avoidance of going to landfills and incinerators and the environmental and human harm and animal harm that it does, and the recirculating items that people need, and the building community as a result of that recirculation and the saving these objects with history and with like meaning to them. All the yeah, I felt that this is this is something that that I could do forever and I wouldn't get bored of.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

So you land the job, and how how long are you with that? I was I was at Think Zero for three or four years. And what kind of work are you doing for them?

SPEAKER_01 17:17

I was doing waste audits. So corporations would hire us to go through their trash. And then it would be you put together a very meticulous report where you're saying, like, here's what we found in the trash, and here's what we found in the recycles, here's the percentage of trash that is not actually trash and could be recycled or could be composted or could be reused. The app would be basically sorting through their trash for like four hours and weighing things and taking photos and putting together these reports. And then we would do trainings, work with work with corporations and do employee trainings, help them culture change as much as possible, like form green teams, just do events for Earth Day, and then we would do compliance assessments of like, are you in compliance with the New York City commercial waste rules? And yeah, those were the core, those were the core um elements of my work there. So why'd you leave? I felt like it was time for me to continue on. And I will say, in retrospect, I don't know if that was the right decision. Like financially, it was not the right decision to do that. But I was gaining traction as the trash walker. I had started the Save Our Compost Coalition and was wanting to do more about legislation. I thought that between social media collaborations and consulting and speaking, I would be able to financially support myself and then to be able to devote more time to the trash walker and to my like legislative work. And the time part was true. I was able to devote more time to those things. The financial part was ended up not being true. Like I wasn't able to financially support myself through through that patchwork of things. So, you know, in retrospect, I I yeah, like I've taken these big leaps in the past and they've worked out for me. And so I did take this big leap and like it worked out in some ways and did not work out in other ways that I had thought it would work out.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

So, but now you are full-time the trash walker.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

No, no.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

So that that's a good change. So I've been doing that for the past I left Think Zero in 2021, so the past four or five years, and it just wasn't, it hasn't been financially feasible. And I I had a son last year also, and it just changes the equation of it also, it like having a family. And so I just started this past week a new job at Beyond Plastics, which is a great nonprofit fighting against plastics, just broadly the expansion of the petrochemical industry, fighting for better better legislation, regulating plastics and reducing the amount of single-use waste. And that's I'm very grateful to have found this. Like this is, yeah, this is like a it's a great fit for me with my advocacy, with my my values. It is inherently meaningful. The founder, Judith Enk, is an incredible mentor who's been in this site for decades and who I have a lot to learn from. And it provides financial stability. Like I don't have to be worried about when is my next brand deal coming? Am I going to get a brand deal? Like it wasn't which wasn't really under my control.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

So in the past few years, as the trash walker, I mean, you've tried to change policy and get the message out. Do you feel like you've been you've had some successes?

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Yeah. And and that's the thing that I'm like, it's like the irony is that I was very, very successful. I was very successful in those ways, but I neglected myself in the process and like just straight up financially. I did a lot of volunteer work or unpaid work. I was the legislative chair of the Manhattan South Waste Advisory Board, which is a citizens group. So, like, you know, you're you're not getting paid for that. But we would do like testify at city council hearings and discuss pending legislation and suggest or meet with council members and suggest different types of legislation that we would like to see. And I, as the as part of Saber Compost, we fought successfully for more funding for community composting and also for the expansion of composting. So hugely successful in both of those. Like we we were able to get, I think it was it was around $28 million for community composting over the past six years. So incredibly like that, it's amazing, incredibly successful, and helping these incredible nonprofits do commute composting education in New York City and composting, like processing, you know, can creating the actual compost. And we are able to. Pass one of the most transformational laws, or help pass it. One of the most trans transformational laws in New York City waste really since I would say like the advent of recycling in 1989. Uh, where now every New Yorker is required by law to separate out their food scraps, which has the potential to reduce the amount of trash by 40%. It's not there. We're nowhere near that. We have a very low capture rate, like that the amount that people are actually putting into the compost bin, but the potential is there. Right. So yeah, it was very like I'm very proud of what we as the coalition were able to achieve.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Yeah, that's amazing. And just getting people educated about it, right? Knowing that that's an issue. You've taken on corporate America in waste. What has that been like? And uh do you feel like you've had successes there?

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Yeah, I think that the most notable case was Coach with their uh slashing their in-store returns, and they had to respond and they said they would no longer destroy in-store returns. And I think that it helped like at different times there had been a spotlight on corporate destruction, and there had been Burberry being like which they admitted that they were burning tens of millions of dollars of merchandise each year. There had been with HM their destruction of merchandise. There have been these different instances, and I was really grateful to be able to put it back in the spotlight and to be contributing to that story. I tried before, I tried like multiple times. Like in your, I just feel like you keep trying and trying, and then sometimes it hits, sometimes it breaks through. And that act it actually resulted in them changing their policy. And I think also it helped then coach like started doing more circular. I don't know, circular, they they started doing the the coach topia thing afterwards, which is like trying to integrate these scraps into their products, but it took it made them take it more seriously, which I was happy about because these things happen. The the corporate destruction typically happens out of sight, and as a result, people don't know about it, despite how widespread it is, and corporations continue with it. And then with Starbucks, I also was able at times to I I'm not quite sure how much impact that had in reality, but it was able to spotlight how they had been promising that they would be donating all this food, and then the food actually was ending up in the trash and they had to respond as a result of that. And then how their store closing policies, how like when when they're closing their stores, they're they end up dumping a lot of merchandise. I don't think that that has actually resulted. I was hoping it would result in like policy changes where they would say, like, okay, if you're closing down a store, we're just gonna transfer this, these, you know, coffee beans and cups and whatever to other stores. I don't actually think that that's happened, unfortunately. But I do think that like more and more it's I think it's chipping away at this myth that corporations are these benevolent friends, you know, that which is just they're absolutely not true. You know, corporations are entities that that are profit seeking and that respond to profit and money and will shift whichever way the money is blowing. So there isn't like this, they don't they don't have unless there are different like some corporations are better than others, but they don't have a moral center, like the way that the way in which individual humans do, you know. Right. If I think an individual human in that situation would would be like, okay, I'm not going to destroy these handbags. That doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Do you think that the more people know about this, the more pressure they can put? Like there is power in what people do if they if they're educated. I think a lot of people just don't know that coach was doing that. And they don't know that this gets tossed in the trash. Do you think and we and we live in such a disposable society? Do you think there's a shift in how we think about that, especially as we see more and more of this?

SPEAKER_01 26:14

Yes. I well, I think that there's a shift. I think you can tell it feels like the there's a big shift happening where people are getting fed up. And that's a good thing. Like people are getting fed up with the wealth inequality, people are getting fed up with corporations polluting, people are getting fed up with the the status quo of for-profit healthcare and for-profits prison systems, for-profit education systems, you know, like everything having we're we're really there shouldn't be profit at all. These, these, these sectors should be serving the people, not serving shareholders. So I think that there is a rise in in kind of hatred for the systems that we've built. And that's a good thing. I don't think we have the outlet, I don't actually think we have the power. And I don't think we have the outlets to express our power. Meaning, like the the tools that we have been given, I think are very insufficient for the moments that we're in. I, you know, voting is insufficient. It's something, but it's but it's not enough. Protesting, I think we've been pro protesting for a while, and that hasn't really led to major changes at the scale needed. Yeah. So I just think calling your legislators, like the the the tools that we have are not enough. And I don't think that the people in power are meeting the moment or like realizing just how just how upset people are and how fed up they are they are with the status quo. And I think that's why you see the rise of populism, right? You know, like, and it's because the our elected officials, I think, have abdicated the responsibility to the people and are pr preserving the status quo in favor in instead of trying something new, trying something different, which would be risky. But I think that like even more risky is maintaining the status quo that we've built.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

So what do you think then should happen next? Like how do we shift that power?

SPEAKER_01 28:04

I don't know. I honestly don't know. I just think that it's I don't think we have enough tools. I think that's the problem. We really like it's it's it just feels like I think I think one of I think we need a new generation of leaders and we need people who are in power to step out of power. I think that there maybe should have be congressional term limits. I think that there's a like the there should be a lot of these reforms in in how we elect people, right? It's hard to say, like congressional term limits, abolishing the Electoral College would be great, getting money out of politics, corporate money out of politics, like undoing Citizen United. So those are those are some of the starting points. I'm just like I'm not optimistic. That's how that's like my my general feeling right now. It's like I'm not optimistic in the direction that the world is going and yeah, the our leadership and the ability to like actually serve the people and not corporations. Yeah, I I I I maybe maybe I'll be more optimistic in the future. But in this current moment, I'm kind of like a little bit at a loss.

SPEAKER_00 29:12

So when you're not optimistic, and I I can understand that you've had successes though. And you know, there's all these great organizations out there doing all this work. You have lots of young people who want to go into this work. What would you tell them that about, you know, what what should they set their sights on and how do they stay in it even through pessimism?

SPEAKER_01 29:39

Well, so that's I I say that on the one hand, and I'm still in it, right? I'm I'm like I'm still in it, I'm still fighting, I'm still trying to do what I can. Where I have found the biggest success is looking on the local level. You know, there's I would start at the local level and then the state level and then the federal level in that order. The local level, I think you can have the biggest bang for your buck in terms of time spent and impact that you can have because your council members are directly elected by you and you can have a direct relationship with them. Like I have my council member's cell phone number and I text her when I see these like wasteful. Mostly I focus on like school waste because I'm hoping that she might do, you know, do something about that. But you should definitely get to know your council member and then you should join an existing group or form one if there isn't, focus on a very specific issue that's achievable that you want to that you want to see. So if that's you want to have start a food scrap drop-off site that's funded by your tax by taxpayer dollars, like that's a great starting point. If you want to see money for swaps or city support for swaps, like that's also a great starting point. If you want to organize around, you know, like a there there are other issues, like a there's a lot with plastics that you could do. There's kind of some smaller things like a skip the stuff bill where you wouldn't allow utensil, single use utensils to be included with your type takeout order unless like you specifically ask for it. So there's so many things that are small that do add up and and are achievable at the local level. And I think you have to be in that, you have to be in the fight, you have to stay in it and focus on where you can get those wins, where you can have an impact. I just, and I I and I'm doing it, you know, and I'm in it and I'm fighting for these incremental changes. But the thing that I'm frustrated about is we need much more than incremental changes. And so that's the difficulty. Like, how can you transform the larger thing? How can you transition to a degrowth economy where it's not based around endless consumption of goods? Like that's very hard to do, and that seems not achievable. And no politician is per pursuing that at all. But ultimately, that is what we need to be doing. Like we don't need any more clothing, right? We really don't, or we need much, much fewer garments produced each year. So that's not happening. I'm and I'm going to, you know, I personally am opting out of the system and I don't purchase new for like as much as possible. I don't purchase new, but it's still the system is still churning in the background. So those are the things I think that like I hold of trying to like I am pessimistic about the changes that we need to happen and the fact that they're not happening, but trying to do what I can at the scale that I can.

SPEAKER_00 32:33

So when you were and you still are trash walking, what surprised you the most? What was the most shocking?

SPEAKER_01 32:40

I mean, at this point, nothing because I've been doing it for a while and see these things. But I think initially it was like from CBS and Walgreens, Dwayne Reed, the trash bags filled with candy that was still good, the trash bags filled with stuff from past holidays and just the scale that I would see sometimes of that, where it could be like 10 trash bags filled with like Christmas merchandise outside of one single store. And then I think also when I encounter someone just like tossing the entire contents of a person's life, yes, at first shocking, but like that has I become numb to the corporate waste that I see, but like there it still feels very emotional to me when I see that when I see someone like someone's life, all the things that they accumulated, then going into the trash. That still is difficult for me to to process. And then yeah, then I it there's then there's like all the patterns. So the college waste at the end of the school year, at first shocking to me. Now it's just that's just what it is, it seems, despite there being a lot of solutions to that. The end of the school year waste for the public school system and private school system is like coming up. And so I'm expecting a lot of waste to come from there.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

Yeah, I I become used to it. If you were talking to either your younger self or a a young college student today, what advice would you give them as far as finding work that is meaningful to them that fits in with their values?

SPEAKER_01 34:16

Only you can know what's meaningful to you, you know. And every person I think has a different path. And I I think it's for me, it was like, what do I go to bed thinking about? What do I wake up thinking about? What is something that I could talk about and learn about and watch webinars about and not get not get bored and just think that there's there's so much more for me to learn. There's so much more for me to integrate and to advocate for and to try to leave my mark here. Like that was that's what waste is for me. So I don't know, and I don't know if that's for everyone. I don't know if everyone is like that. Like I have a bit of an obsessive personality in sometimes. So I don't know if like that's a good marker for other people, but that's how it was for me. But I think that you can tell when when you're experiencing meaningful work and where you're in flow, where you lose track of time, where you're absorbed in what you're doing and you're kind of loving it, and this is something that I could spend my every day doing, you know. I think that that's that's ultimately what people are seeking when when they're looking for meaningful work. And I would say it's a privilege, also. It's a privilege to have found this. And one of the structural things that helped me was that fact that I didn't have any student loan debt because my parents paid for my college. And so I was able to take these gaps in at different points in my career. And I wouldn't have been able to do that probably if I had student loans. And I think that that's also just like thinking about all the ways in which we could be doing things differently. Like we could have free college. We could. And it would free up so many people to then have be able to take time and be able to like, I can take a step back and I could think about what do I actually want to be spending my time, my life doing rather than going straight into work to a job that you don't like, but and staying there because you have no choice but to continue paying off your student loans. Yeah. So so that's also like your my my life circumstances helped me find my meaningful path.

SPEAKER_00 36:21

Right. Do you look ahead? Do you think about where you're gonna be in 10 years from now? 10 years, no.

SPEAKER_01 36:26

I mean, ultimately with my family, we do want to spend more time outside of the city, especially with my son. Like I would love him growing up a little bit more immersed in nature and a day-to-day and like having a garden and having him able to spend time in that garden, you know, like that's that's a big vision. But my my the big thing that I'm focused on now, in addition to my new job, is the office of circularity, which is basically taking all these patterns that I've noticed over the past nearly a decade of going through the trash and saying, like, why can't we do things differently? Why can't we do this targeted intervention to reduce waste in this very specific way and do it systemically because the, you know, there's really only so much I can be doing as a single individual. And I'm aware that in some ways I've made a difference and in a lot of ways I have not at all. And so, you know, like these are I have a long, long list of things I want to achieve. Like I want to achieve a course across corporations, across residents, across school waste, across institutional government waste, all these, all these different ways that like there are ways, like the the patterns and say like the the frequency with which I see these waste issues and saying like we could just a small tweak, we could be doing something differently and better.

SPEAKER_00 37:46

And lastly, if there's one thing you could tell everybody to do or change or anything like that to to help with this problem, and it's a huge problem. You know, I I always tell students, yeah, we throw something away and we never think about it again. But just because we threw it away doesn't mean it disappeared. Yeah. And I think we we don't talk about it enough. So if there's one thing that you would tell people, please do this, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 38:15

I would say please get involved with your local government. And you should have a relationship, a direct relationship with your council member. You should join a group that is already fighting for an issue that you care about, or if not, start your own group. And there is so much power in working in a coalition to fight for systemic change on the local level, which is achievable. Like that is like talking about our power, that's where our power lies actually. Our power lies on the local level. And I think that's part of what my frustration is, is like that it's only on the local level and doesn't seem to exist on the state level or the federal level. But on the local level, we can actually achieve things. And so, and it's important not to do it alone because you're going to burn out and also you're not going to be as effective if you do it alone. You know, you need a group of people together so you can all make phone calls, you can all testify at city council, you can all like use your unique skills to spread the campaign. So, like someone runs the social media and someone does in-person events and someone meets with the legislators, like you need a bunch of different people doing a bunch of different things in order to make a campaign successful. So, really like, and I think that one of the positive side effects is that you meet aligned people who then can become mentors and friends, and you're building your network too. So if you're seeking a job, that's also a great thing, and you're building your resume and doing something within your control to yeah, to help your career and help your ambitions. So I think that that's one of the most powerful things to do. And so even if you have a job that that's not your passion, that's not your where you find meaning, like you can also find it working on the local level in a coalition. And then maybe eventually that can become a full-time job. So I would say really like that's where we need more people and also we need more young people. Um, like I'm I I'm part of the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board. And if you go to one of their meetings, I think a lot of a lot of the people are there are people with more free time who tend to be retired. So they're older. We need younger people in these movements, and it's not enough to be posting on your own social media account about how you wish something would change because that doesn't actually move the needle. Like it it's better than not posting, right? You're putting something out into the universe, you're letting people know, but it doesn't actually have an impact. And the way to have an impact is to join a coalition and then work systemically on the local level. I think that's like one of the most powerful things people can be doing.

SPEAKER_00 40:53

Right. I think that's great. Anna, thank you so much. I appreciate all the work you're doing and getting that message and that word out there. And congratulations on your successes, and I'm sure you'll have many more. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you. If Anna's story got you thinking about the things we throw away, the systems we build, or your own search for work that actually matters, I hope you'll stay in it. The most powerful thing you can do, as Anna said, is start local. Get to know your council member, join a coalition, find the specific issue you care about, and work on it with other people. You're more effective in community than you are alone. If you want to follow Anna's work, find her on Instagram at the Trashwalker, where she documents what she finds on her trash block, advocates for composting and waste legislation, and calls out corporate destruction in real time. You can also see her story and her work in the documentary Buy Now the Shopping Conspiracy on Netflix. As always, if today's conversation meant something to you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. Leave us a review, subscribe, and come see the work we are doing at EastoNetwork.org, where we are providing young adults from diverse backgrounds with the resources and support they need to chart successful paths into the future. Whether you're navigating the unknown, making a pivot, or still figuring it out one step at a time, you're not alone. The route may not be linear, but there is always a way forward. I'm Monica Argandonia, and I'll see you next time on Pathfound.