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Over the past year, I’ve spent a lot more time in the kitchen. Covid-19 disrupted my work, meaning I had more time to spend making delicious food (including sourdough bread). But it also got me realising how much waste our kitchens can produce. Here are a few steps on how to be more sustainable in the kitchen.

Five Steps For A Sustainable Kitchen

Start composting

This is honestly a game-changer. When I started composting all our food scraps, I realised how little we actually had to throw away in the trash. So much of what I was throwing away was food scraps, which is great at breaking down into compost in the right conditions. But in the wrong conditions, it’s releasing methane into the environment or worse, becoming embalmed and not breaking down at all.

Composting in an apartment building

In our apartment building’s rubbish room there’s a large wheelie bin specifically for food scraps. This means that everyone in the building, even those that have never thought about composting, can do it with ease.

What about the smell?

We keep a small bucket in our fridge to collect our scraps so we don’t have to worry about smells or attracting flies.

Produce bags

Sometimes it seems like almost everything I buy comes wrapped in plastic. Tofu, cheese, frozen fruit, rice. One place that it’s really easy to skip the plastic? The produce aisle. Especially fruits and veggies that are loose on the shelf. Rather than put each item in its own plastic bag, why not leave them loose in the trolley? Or, get some cute reusable produce bags that will keep your apples separate from your pears.

Keep an eye on freshness

There’s nothing more disappointing than planning to cook something using a specific ingredient, only to dig it out and find it’s gone off. Or completely forgetting about something you had in the back of the cupboard, opening it and finding that it’s gone off. This is not only a waste of money but of all the energy it took to get whatever it was from the ground or factory to your home.

Making waste old news

Have a shelf or box in your fridge and pantry where you can put items that are nearing the end of their shelf life. Then you’ll know to check there for snacks and ingredients that need to be used up before you start to cook.

Bulk buy

Now that you’re not wasting food, it’s time to stop wasting packaging. Buying things that you know you love in larger quantities can dramatically reduce the packaging you’re throwing out. I love nut butter and was going through jar after jar of Fix and Fogg’s Everything Butter. I do re-use them as much as I can, but there’s only so many I can do this with. Now I’ve switched to their large jars of Peanut Butter and there are a lot fewer jars filling up my kitchen shelves.

You can also look at bulk supermarkets to purchase grocery items and completely cut out all of the packagings. I find this super helpful for things like spices that I go through a lot and other ingredients that you can only buy in plastic in the supermarket.

Ditch the Cloth

Much of the plastic roaming around the earth at the moment is actually tiny fibres believed to be coming from fabrics. It’s even being found in the air and rain of the most remote places on earth. Swapping out your plastic cloth for one that’s compostable will help prevent some of those tiny little fibres from going down the kitchen sink.

Final Note

There are plenty of steps that you can take to make your life more sustainable. Begin by looking around at what you’re using on a daily basis and see what small changes you can make. These small steps build momentum and can add up to more than you could imagine.

I’d love to know, what’s your favourite sustainability hack in the kitchen?

Sustainability in the Kitchen