Our Sustainable Kitchen

Since moving into our first home a few months ago we have been working hard on making our space low waste and sustainable. 

Our kitchen gets the most use out of any room in our house. And we have been doing many things to make it more sustainable. 

The biggest thing has been reducing our food waste. This includes being more mindful while food shopping and cooking. We will often freeze meals if we know we have cooked too much, so we can save it for another day. With summer upon us we are lucky to have many farmers markets around us, giving us the ability to support small businesses, buy local produce and often buy in smaller quantities.

Stay tuned for posts to come as we work on building a compost pile to limit our food waste even more. 

A garbage disposer installed in our sink helps to reduce the waste that makes it to our landfills. Currently almost all of our food waste gets put into the disposer and added to our sewer system.  just be careful that you don’t put pastas, oils and bones in the disposer. 

When moving it is tempting to buy all new things, but to create a more sustainable household we have been only using what we already have, or what we can get second hand. 

Swapping out disposable paper towels and napkins is an easy swap that we have made, not only helping the environment but saving us money as well.  

Our Swedish dishcloth is always kept at our sink and used constantly. From wiping the counters, the stove top and the sink. It is my go to for cleaning anything in the kitchen.  This dishcloth is reusable, can be washed in the washer machine or by hand. And at the end of its life it is compostable. 

I got mine at our local zero waste store, simple good.

Another thing we use are reusable paper towels. We have a roll of cotton UnPaper towels from Marleysmonsters.com.  These are so easy to use from cleaning up messes to using as napkins with our meals. They can be washed any way you prefer but leave out to dry because they do shrink.

My favorite thing about our sustainable kitchen has been regrowing food from our scraps. This has not only been fun but rewarding as well. There are many foods that can be grown from scraps, providing for you again and again. 

Some that we have started include green onion, sweet potato, and basil. All that is required is putting the scraps in a jar of clean water and watching them grow. After a few weeks the sweet potato will be ready to plant, but the green onion and basil can be harvested from the water jar over and over again, or planted in soil if desired. 

It is important to keep the water clean or else fungus and bacteria will begin to grow. 

Do you have any sustainable kitchen tips you would like to share?