Besides loving to cook, I love nature. I am a lifelong environmentalist. One of the most visible aspects of our environmental footprint in the kitchen is our garbage. Landfills have a major impact on the environment, polluting air and groundwater. How can you minimize kitchen waste?

First, compost food scraps. If your yard is big enough, start a compost pile or get a compost barrel. If you do not have a yard, you can find small worm composting bins for indoors or balconies. This Green Life has a rebuttal for all your concerns about composting. I am lucky enough to live in San Francisco, a city with a composting collection system, so I just put food waste in a green bin alongside trash and recycling, and the city collection service whisks it away to be turned into fertilizing compost for vineyards and landscaping. I was quite excited when San Francisco passed a composting and recycling ordinance!

Before heading to the grocery store or farmer’s market, pack some reusable grocery bags. At the checkout counter, don’t forget to ask the bagger to use your bags. If they end up using plastic or paper bags instead, you can always reuse these bags for future groceries, as trash bag liners, or for craft projects.

Also bring mesh or cloth bags for produce, and resealable plastic bags, jars or containers for bulk foods.  Many stores allow you to weigh (tare) your own containers before you fill them up with bulk foods so that you are not charged for the extra weight.

Choose fruits and vegetables that are not packaged in plastic and foam and put them in your own cloth or resealable bags. Buy grains, nuts, coffee, and anything else you can find in the bulk section rather than pre-packaged – this reduces the amount of packaging needed not only for your portion, but for the whole shipping process. Bulk foods tend to be cheaper than their packaged counterparts, and you can choose however much or little you want.

Rather than buying a cornbread or cake mix, get the flour, baking soda, sugar, and so forth separately. While it may seem easier to get the premade mix, it is more expensive, and mixes tend to have unnecessary additives and preservatives.

Learn to make more foods you normally buy premade and prepackaged, whether soup, beans, tomato sauce, salsa, vegan sausages, cookies, or granola. You will probably end up with a much healthier, fresh, and tasty alternative. I will post recipes for all of these in the future!

When you do buy packaged foods, choose items with the least packaging or the most recyclable packaging. Paper and glass are highly recyclable and do not contaminate your food; plastic may leach chemicals into food, so avoid if possible. Cans are highly recyclable, but with acidic foods, there is also a risk of chemicals leaching into food. Glass jars are great because you can reuse them endlessly.

Coffee drinkers, use a cloth or gold toned coffee filter instead of paper filters. You can avoid the plastic and filters associated with an automatic coffee maker with a French press or a stovetop espresso maker. For that drip coffee taste without a machine, use a Chemex, a combination glass funnel and flask, or a Chorreador, a reusable coffee filter on a stand. You can make your own Chorreador by sewing natural linen cloth into a funnel shape and hanging it on a stand or fashioning a wire filter holder.

Tea drinkers, use loose leaf tea in tea balls to eliminate tea bags and tea bag wrappers.

Although body care products are not technically part of your kitchen waste, you can make your own body products with food from your kitchen and lower your usage of plastic containers. Learn to make your own body care products and reuse your old body product containers. CrunchyBetty.com has many great recipes for making facewash, chapstick, deodorant, shampoo, healing salves, and more.

Once you start to think about each item you put into you trash carefully, and how you could eliminate or re-use it in the future, you will find your garbage shrinking until you only need a minuscule can!

For more tips and a wealth of information, check out NRDC’s Smarter Living Food Guide.

All photos by Liina Laufer.