the fields behind Jonah’s childhood home in Siolim, Goa, were the kind you carry for the rest of your life.
Old village house in front, hectares of paddy at the back, a river wrapping around the land. His childhood was spent outdoors: running through the fields at dusk, swimming in the river, and wandering without much supervision. It was ordinary then. It feels rare now.
“We were probably the last generation that did it,” he says. “Our children won’t swim in the river or play the way we did.”
He didn’t have the words for it as a child. A growing sense that something that had held his childhood together was being quietly removed.
The change wasn’t a single event. It arrived the way it usually does in Goa: slowly, then all at once. One season, there was a clear view across the fields. Then a compound wall appeared. Then a gated community with luxury villas.
Paradise paved over for parking lots.
before the whale, a cloth bag
Sustainability arrived in Jonah’s life in the form of a ubiquitous cloth bag.
His parents were the sort who would remind you not to accept plastic at the shop. At the time, it felt like a small family quirk rather than a statement. He laughs now at how basic it seems compared to the direction his life has taken.
“Not taking a plastic bag now feels very surface-level,” he says. “But that’s how it starts. You pick up something from your parents, then other people take you one step further.”
One of those people was his wife Sasha’s aunt, who pushed them to look past the word “eco-friendly” and focus on use itself. A paper straw is still a straw you use once and then throw away. The material has changed; the mindset has not.
Another was his friend Eldridge, who ran a restaurant and wanted to turn it into a zero-waste space. The idea was quietly radical: source everything without plastic. No sachets, no cling film, no single-use packaging.
“It intrigued me a lot,” Jonah says. “We tried to see how close to zero-waste a restaurant could get.”
The restaurant eventually closed for reasons unrelated to its waste policy, but the experiment stayed. It became the seed for Ecoposro, their first bulk, low-waste venture, and later for Zeroposro, the zero-waste store Jonah runs today in Panaji, Goa’s capital city.
Another person Jonah learnt a lot from was Sanjiv, who runs Sensible Earth who incubated Zeroposro as it pivoted from a dormant Ecoposro into what it is today. A second quest took root: supporting hyper-local agriculture, not as an add-on, but as part of the same resistance to single use plastic.
But before it all, Jonah walked a different path.
He wanted to make wildlife documentaries, especially underwater. He took a job with a scuba diving school in Thailand, shooting for them and learning underwater cinematography. It was one of those paths that look, from the outside, as though they’ve clicked into place: nature, art, ocean, camera.
Then he got diving sickness and was forced out of the water for six weeks.
He came back to Goa to recover. While he was meant to be waiting for his body to settle, Eldridge asked him to help start a zero-waste restaurant. Jonah said yes, thinking of it as a project.
“I just never went back to diving and shooting,” he says.
It sounds almost casual when he puts it that way. But in that quiet pivot away from documenting nature and towards working on how people live with it, his current life took shape.
a different kind of dive
Jonah’s definition of sustainability is disarmingly straightforward.
“For me, it’s not having to take advantage of the planet, or harm it, for your wellbeing or success,” he says. “And doing whatever you do consciously.”
He doesn’t claim perfection. His own life has pets that need packaged food, a vehicle that burns fuel, and a house that, in his words, is “as sustainable as we can make it, but not zero-waste”.
Instead of purity, he thinks in terms of a quota: you will generate some non-biodegradable waste; the point is to stay on the right side of it. When he does give in to convenience or produces more waste than he’d like, he tries to overcompensate afterwards.
“Like exercise,” he says. “Missing one day doesn’t mean you throw everything away. You wake up and try again.”
There are, however, lines he will not cross. Waste segregation is non-negotiable. At home, all organic waste is composted in the garden. Plastics are cleaned, dried and sent for recycling. Food never goes into the same bin as packaging.
He will not take a plastic straw, even at a roadside coconut stall. “It’s ridiculous,” he says. “It’s the simplest thing to avoid and still one of the biggest contributors.”
And he pays close attention to energy, resisting the slow creep of always-on cooling and comfort. None of this is glamorous. It’s just quietly repetitive work, which is the point.
staples in a glass jars
Zeroposro sits at the intersection of two problem statements Jonah cares about: reducing dry waste from households, and increasing the amount of food grown locally in Goa.
The shop sells staples like grains, pulses, spices, and oils without single-use packaging. Customers bring their own containers or reusable bags. On the farm side, Zeroposro works directly with Goan farmers to source as much as possible from within the state.
Running a plastic-free bulk store in Goa’s climate is, in his words, “a lot of work”. Humidity is high, the monsoon lasts six months, and insects thrive. Where a conventional shop can seal everything in plastic and forget it, Zeroposro has to handle goods more like a kitchen than a warehouse.
They keep stocks lean, buying only as much grain as they expect to sell within the month. Every week, sacks are rotated out into the sun and back in again. Each batch carries a handwritten card noting when it was last sunned and when it needs attention.
“It means more manpower and more time,” Jonah says. “In a regular shop, they wouldn’t need to do all this.”
He frames it as the cost of aligning practice with belief. Plastic, he is quick to point out, is not inherently evil; it’s the pattern of single-use, especially around food and personal care, that he struggles with.
On the farming side, the work is as much about relationships as it is about logistics.
paradise, slowly parcelled
Goa’s farmers, he says, fall roughly into three groups. There are those committed to continuing agriculture. There are those on the fence, torn between tilling land that pays ₹30,000-40,000 a year for rice, and converting a plot into a shop or rooms that earn the same in monthly rent. And there are those who have already made peace with selling or filling their fields.
“The last group, honestly, we don’t go near,” he says. “That becomes activism, and that’s not what Zeroposro is.”
Instead, they focus on the first group and gently try to pull the second towards staying with the land. It is sensitive work. Telling a farmer to refuse life-changing rental income is not a request he feels entitled to make.
So he tries to make farming itself more viable.
“When we started sourcing from some farmers, a few of them began growing more because of our demand,” he says. “From sixty beds to a hundred, a hundred and twenty. Seeing that is very rewarding.”
Word of mouth does the rest. Goa is small; WhatsApp and Facebook have made it smaller. One farmer leads to another. Some weeks, he gets two or three new messages from people saying, “We have a small farm, will you come and see it?”
The change runs both ways. Working closely with farmers has altered the way he sees his own state.
“Growing up, you assume most vegetables come from Belgaum (food basket in the neighbouring state of Karnataka) or wherever,” he says. “Now I see how much can actually grow here. That’s brought a lot of joy.”
He has no illusions about government support. When asked what would help Zeroposro grow, he doesn’t talk about subsidies or schemes. He talks about basics: enforcing noise limits so he can sleep and work, maintaining roads so his delivery rickshaw isn’t constantly damaged, and keeping canals and field channels open so water can move and farmers can irrigate.
“If they can do their basic jobs, that’s already a huge help,” he says. “Beyond that, I don’t really expect anything.”
On waste, his frustration is specific. Panchayats and municipalities, he notes, think mostly in terms of managing what’s already been generated: bins, segregation drives, material recovery facilities. Some villages put out sacks at scenic spots, asking people to keep the area clean.
It’s better than nothing. It’s also, in his view, nowhere close to enough.
“If you’re only asking: how do we manage waste that’s been generated, you’ve already lost,” he says. “In the end, it gets burnt somewhere, whether in a backyard or a cement factory. The real question is: how do we not generate it in the first place?”
the whale is single-use
That shift away from tidying up and towards not creating the mess at all is quietly subversive in a culture organised around consuming more. He knows it puts him at odds with the logic of growth.
He also knows the alternative.
He has watched the swimming holes from his childhood, rain-filled depressions in the land, fill up with picnic trash. He has seen hills between his home and his workplace cut down and filled. He talks about it without drama, but the fear is real.
“You never know which part of Goa is going to be destroyed next,” he says. “The hill near your house, the river you grew up next to. It’s changing so fast.”
Like anyone who works in sustainability, Jonah knows the odds are not in his favour.
He is aware of sinkholes in far-off countries, of drying rivers, of projections that half the world could face water scarcity within a decade. He knows that Goa features on lists of vulnerable regions. He knows that every sack he suns and every plastic bag he refuses exists alongside a world of private jets and fossil fuel.
Does he ever question the point of it all?
“I think it doesn’t matter,” he says, after a pause. “I think you just need to do the best with the time and resources given to you.”
Burnout, when it comes, doesn’t arrive because a billionaire chartered a flight. It arrives when destruction is close enough to smell: a field being filled in, a canal blocked, a hill shaved down. On those days, it’s tempting to give in to the feeling that his work is a drop in a rising sea.
What brings him back are people.
“If you wake up and keep doing the work, you’re surrounded by fantastic, inspiring people,” he says. “By midday, you’ve met farmers, colleagues, customers. You remember all the good that’s happened, the people who rely on you. The farmers who are so happy when we turn up. That really shifts the mood.”
Sasha is another anchor. Her support has allowed him to choose a path that is not always easy to explain at a bank counter. When he talks about safety nets, he speaks first about her.
There is also, underneath everything, a plain stubbornness.
In seven years, he has had enough reasons to walk away. He has watched a whole year’s worth of energy and money go into an electric rickshaw mobile store experiment that didn’t work. He has faced the same cash-flow worries that shadow most small, principled businesses. More than once, he has looked at friends in more conventional jobs and wondered, briefly, if he made a mistake.
Then the doubts subside.
“If I have a very serious conversation with myself, I don’t see myself doing anything else,” he says. “So even when times get tough, and I start to doubt, sooner or later I find my way back here.”
But if he could change one thing in his past, he says, he would get more business and financial training from day one. Not to chase scale at any cost, but to make the work more resilient.
Jonah is clear about what he is not. He is not a fixer. He is not the only person doing this work. He is suspicious of any framing that suggests the world would fall apart if he stopped.
“If I say something would be lost to the world if I stopped, that feels very egotistical,” he says. “We’ve been inspired by others; others are doing it now; others will come.”
What he hopes is that his work can stand as proof of possibility.
He talks often about his grandparents’ generation, when people took dabbas (tin boxes) to the shop for oil and grain, and kettles for milk. “We haven’t invented this,” he says of Zeroposro. “We’re just bringing back how it was done just two generations ago.”
If his story does anything, he would like it to show that you can build a life and a livelihood around that older sense of enough. That you can work closely with land and farmers, refuse certain kinds of convenience, be honest about your compromises, and still find happiness.
