Freegans adopt a minimalist lifestyle to help protect the health of the environment. [Photo provided to China Daily]

A proactive solution

In 2017, Ding went to study animation further at the Southern Institute of Technology in New Zealand, which she considers to be the best way to spend her accumulated money without adding any weight to her backpack.

While studying there, her 3D animation project, The Mad Taxi Driver, won the SIT Weta Digital Award for Outstanding Animation issued by the school.

She has shared her life on social media platforms, such as Tianya forum, Sina Weibo and WeChat. Her story has been reported in the media, through which many people began to learn about freeganism.

Originating in the United States, freeganism was a response to the massive amounts of food that rich countries were discarding in the late 1990s. Freegans object to the overconsumption and environmental degradation on which they claim our economic order depends, and they register that dissent by opting out of it, recovering, redistributing, and consuming wasted goods, from discarded food to castoff clothes and furniture.

Their code is set out in Freegans: Diving Into the Wealth of Food Waste in America published in 2016 by Alex Barnard, who wrote the book based on years of fieldwork and in-depth interviews with freegans in New York. He's now an assistant professor of sociology at New York University.

A 2013 report from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization points out that the global volume of food wastage annually is estimated at 1.6 billion metric tons of "primary product equivalents" and the total food wastage for the edible part of this amounts to 1.3 billion metric tons.

Ding's icon, the late Heidemarie Schwermer, a German woman who hasn't spent any money since 1996, says in the documentary Living Without Money: "For some people I'm a provocation. But for others, I'm an answer".

For Ding, freeganism is her answer.

"When you give up something, you will receive something unexpected in return," Ding says.