The author of the undergraduate paper reviews some sources and literature on zero waste and carries out ethnographic fieldwork in an attempt to research definitions and concepts of waste and the zero waste movement among students. She comes to find that the zero waste concept started as an entrepreneurial idea in the 1970s. Despite its author’s wish to apply it more broadly, in the next decades, zero waste became popular mostly as a lifestyle. Conversations with students show the author of the thesis that their motivations for waste reduction practices are human health, the quality of human life and the health of our planet, and also far-reaching concerns for our descendants on this planet. The (in)compatibility of students’ everyday lives with the zero waste concept depends on what definition we take as the starting point, but students are certainly limited by their worse socio-economic position, other formal and informal obligations, and the need for a certain comfort. The incompatibility of social approaches and practices is seen in the perceived feelings of frustration, caused by the discrepancy between students’ ecological values and possibilities in their everyday life.
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