While many homeowners brag about their expensive furniture or crystal and china collections, Luz Sabas takes pride in her trash. The 70-something Sabas is one of the pioneering proponents of “zero garbage” in the Philippines.

She started her efforts in 1968, when a strike left Manila with no trucks to collect garbage. City officials directed Sabas, who was then a nurse, to find ways to prevent the city from becoming filled with garbage.

“When trash collectors went on strike, I went to the old dumpsite known as the Smoky Mountain,” she said. “There I realized very little needed to be disposed of. Whole families living near the dump waited for the trucks to unload their cargo then started sifting through the new pile separating cans, plastic, rubber, broken glass, and even tattered rags.” They sorted the trash and then sold materials to waiting buyers.

Her home in a Manila suburb is full of recycled treasures. She has made artificial flowers from corncobs, mango seeds, and straw brooms. Her recliners and umbrellas are crafted from empty juice packs. An old swimming pool is now a fishpond. She has converted old tires into swings for her grandchildren.

The plastic containers, glass bottles, and tin cans she cannot find a use for she sends off to be recycled. She composts organic trash and uses it to fertilize her home garden. The exercise leaves her with little “trash.”

Figuring out what to do with emissions, waste, and garbage has become an important issue in many countries. “One half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as wastes within a year,” according to The Weight of Nations, a report by the World Resources Institute (WRI). Japan produces 11 metric tons of waste per person each year, while each year 25 metric tons of waste are produced for every person in the United States.

Most developed countries have recycling programs, but it turns out that the solutions are not always so simple. According to the WRI report, recycling made only a small difference in overall resource volumes going through economies.

“To substantially reduce wastes,” said Emily Matthews, lead author of the report, “will require that economies adopt dramatically different technologies of production and the public adopt dramatically different patterns of consumption.”

A few countries, such as Germany, are making progress toward reducing packaging and pollution emissions, and requiring that companies produce products and materials are re-useable. WRI is working to promote similar measures around the world.

“But even the determined efforts of industrialized countries to reduce waste, is reaping, at best, modest results,” said Matthews. “Resource efficiency gains have been more than offset by the tremendous scale of economic growth and consumer choices that favor energy- and material-intensive lifestyles.”

The Weight of Nations emphasizes the need for developing countries, which are eager to reach the development level of industrialized nations, to draft policies that will effectively address the need to reduce resource use and the generation of waste.

Although Sabas has demonstrated that zero waste is not impossible to achieve, she still has to work hard convincing others to follow her example. “Recycling is a low-cost, low-tech solution to the garbage problem, but it is not easy to get people to adopt the habit,” she said. “I have to constantly monitor, remind, and educate people.”