The kitchen is the heart of your home—and also one of the highest waste producing. We’ve put together 3 essentials to help reduce kitchen waste on your zero waste home journey.
- Rethink Food Waste
When discussing waste, it’s logical to start with the primary source, food scraps. These typically get shoved down a garbage disposal or thrown in the trash—both unsustainable options. Garbage disposals aren’t made to handle larger food scrap items and can clog or break your garbage disposal. Most households throw their food scraps into the trash which then gets sent to a landfill. Food is biodegradable, you might say, so there’s no harm with this option. In actuality, landfills are so tightly packed that they lack the proper amount of oxygen needed to biodegrade food, thus releasing intense amounts of methane gas into the air which is even more harmful than CO2 emissions.
That’s why we opt for at home composting. Use a kitchen compost container to collect food scraps while you cook, then dispose of in a backyard compost bin or take to your local composting site. Backyard composting is much easier than you might think. Here’s a link to get you started: https://www.ecocycle.org/backyard-composting#started
2. Reduce Plastic
Our kitchens can often times become a haven of plastic packaging, utensils, and containers. Did you know most of the plastic we recycle ends up in the landfill? Skip the plastic dish soap bottle and switch to bottle-free dish soap and wooden/compostable dish washing tools.
Shop our package-free dish soap bar:
3. Reuse Containers
Empty glass ketchup bottle, just finished the jar of strawberry jelly? Save your glass food packaging to store dry goods in your pantry. Then shop in bulk for your rice, pasta, cereal and other dry goods to refill you pantry as needed.
