From Yak Dung to Plastics: Rethinking Zero Waste in a Tibetan Pastoral Community

Abstract

This article examines how Zero Waste is interpreted and practised in Naksoknyi, a Tibetan pastoral community in Qinghai Province, China. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, focus groups and analysis of NGO publications, it shows that the initiative is not simply adopted as a global environmental model, but translated into local moral, ecological and material concerns. This article begins with the problem of waste as an unstable category: materials such as dried yak dung are used as fuel, signify wealth and are regarded as pure, while plastics emerge as harmful because they persist, threaten livestock and disrupt existing cycles of use, burning and decay. In Naksoknyi, households pursue waste reduction through refusal and replacement of and a distinctive approach to plastics that are neither reused nor discarded. These practices reveal both the possibilities and limits of Zero Waste in a pastoral context where plastic packaging, household containers and ritual materials remain difficult to avoid. By tracing how the concept is named, adapted and lived with, the article argues that theories of waste reduction must account not only for material diversion, but also for the cultural, infrastructural and ecological conditions through which materials come to count as waste.