The kitchen is the heart of your home. It’s where you gather as a family, invite friends for meals, and bust out your very best dance moves. It is also a great place to introduce sustainable living ideas for a more eco friendly kitchen.
Between all the meal prep and dishwashing, it’s also an easy place to pile up single-use plastics.
A few quick cures to reduce plastic use:
- Replace single-use bags with reusable ones. Stasher bags are beloved by all
- Substitute disposable water bottles with reusable ones. The Stanley Cup is having its moment just like the Klean Kanteen before it. FWIW, don’t fall for the trends, get what you like and will use. There are so many great bottles in this category
- Swap plastic straws for metal or reusable ones
- Ditch the paper plates, plastic flatware, and plastic cups for reusable options
- Store reusable shopping bags in your car for easy access, and cut down on single use plastic grocery bags
Whew, just those choices alone will significantly cut down on plastic waste. If your palms are getting sweaty and your head a little spinny, choose one or two to implement first and build from there.
How to Recycle
The kitchen is a great place to focus on recycling. But, it’s hard to know what to recycle and what’s trash. For example, cereal boxes recycle but the plastic bag holding the cereal does not. Ugh!
And, it’s important to get recycling right. If we put items in that don’t recycle, like soiled items, we can end up contaminating a whole batch of otherwise good material.
Do a quick google search and find your city/county guidelines for recycling. This information is easy to find, promise. Some Home Sustainable good rules of thumb:
- Cardboard recycles unless it is contaminated by something like grease (I see you pizza box)
- Glass generally DOES NOT go in curbside pickup anymore. Glass was breaking and making it hard to recycle other things like paper covered with chards of glass. Do you best to wash out the container, store with other glass (aka my collection of wine bottles), and then find a glass specific drop off. I also like keeping glass for pantry or food storage. Yay reuse
- Plastic recycles…. sometimes. Why couldn’t it be easy? Check the bottom of the plastic bottle or container and note the recycle number. The higher the better, so number 1 should be accepted in all recycle spots. Again, check your local requirements for which numbers they accept. On theme, plastic has to be mostly clean. I like to let some water sit in my container and then wipe out loosened food. But, let’s be honest, this is not happening with the peanut butter jar. Make peace and throw the PB container in the trash
- Metal cans are often accepted in curbside recycling. Same note as above, these have to be mostly clean so let some water soak the remaining food/sauce/juice/etc
While all those eco-friendly kitchen swaps will help your home to become more sustainable, this is a big one. Especially for those of us running households with little Mr. and Ms. “I don’t like it” (even though you loved it yesterday) and “I’m done” (with half a plate of food on the table).
Yup. We’re talking about food waste. UGH!
Raise your hand if you just ditched all last week’s fruits, vegetables, and leftovers you meant to eat for this week’s next victims. Taylor said it best, “Hey, it’s me, I’m the problem, it’s me.” OOPS!
Reducing food waste lowers greenhouse gas emissions, which reduces air pollution and slows global climate change, making a healthier and happier earth for all of us.
Food Waste Increases Methane Emissions
Reducing food waste is a big thing we can all do to reduce our impact on the earth. Here’s how this breaks down.
When food waste breaks down in landfills, it releases methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas emission, just like carbon dioxide. But methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. So, reducing food waste will reduce our methane emissions.
Here are a couple of tips to reduce food waste this week.
Eco Friendly Kitchen: Meal Planning
Be free of the dreaded “what’s for dinner” while you’re getting everyone where they need to be, wrapping up your work day, making a mental note of what needs to be done tomorrow, and on and on.
It’s a little more work on the front end but it makes your busy weeknight meals much easier.
Planning your meals and shopping for what you need will ensure you don’t end up with random ingredients that sit and go bad.
I really like the free app Mealime for planning. You plan your meals, and it creates a shopping list, so you know exactly what you need. Magic.
If meal planning feels overwhelming, pick a protein for each night of the week. This helps direct meal prep, and you can keep things frozen and only thaw what you need when you need it.
Eco Friendly Kitchen: Use Your Freezer
This may seem obvious, but you have no idea how much time and money-saving you could be missing out on just by utilizing your freezer.
Buy frozen proteins that can be saved until thawed. This will reduce the amount of food you meant to make but didn’t have time to this week, going bad. I always have some frozen salmon (yay omega-3s and it’s delish), tilapia (easy fish tacos), and chicken on hand. Salmon and tilapia thaw pretty quickly but ya gotta pull that chicken out in the morning if you’re planning on using it for the evening.
You can do the same for fruits and veggies on the verge of rotting. Throw them in your freezer to use in smoothies later. Check out how easy this is:
Batch your favorite freezable dinners. This is cost-effective and is so valuable for the nights you’re waiting for mom to make dinner, only to realize you’re the mom. Sometimes you just don’t want to. Having a few frozen meals ready to go makes whipping up a homemade meal for your family quick and easy.
Composting
If your brain is screaming, “composting! Composting! When is she gonna mention composting?” You are on the right track. We’re going to talk alllllll about it next time, every dirty, stinky detail. And I promise you, it’s not as hard or scary (or dirty and stinky) as you might think.
How are you doing? We’ve covered the bathroom, laundry room, and now your kitchen. Drop me a line below; I would love to hear what swaps you have made that you are (or aren’t) loving.
Cheers to us, the do-gooders. The ones that want better for the earth and our people. Your small acts add up to a whole lot for all of us.
the home sustainable 
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