Keep your kitchen squeECO clean
Home » Blog » Holly Jean Brooker » Keep your kitchen squeECO cleanAdd a few green changes into your kitchen to create a green, sustainable hub for the family to enjoy. Holly Jean shares a few ideas on how to go about getting your kitchen green and squeECO clean.
Image by Ann Gordon via Flickr
The kitchen is seen as a hub in the home, providing necessary food and beverages, companionship as we busily prepare meals, a place to chat with friends over a cup of tea at the breakfast bar or table. Being such a vital and well-used area in the home, keeping it green can be forgotten as we juggle grocery bills, lack of time and habit.
- Reduce waste. Reuse leftovers! How many times do we cook a meal, serve it up and realise we have cooked more than needed? We scoop the extras into a bowl to have for ‘lunch’, and four days later find it pushed to the back of the fridge untouched. It then goes in the bin (or toilet if you're my mum. Yuck!), to rot itself into oblivion. Very wasteful. If this is a problem you relate to, how about being realistic and scooping it straight into a storage container and into the freezer for those nights you're home alone, don’t want to cook or when you know you have a busy day ahead and will need it for lunch. If it really needs to be thrown out, you could embrace composting! Composting doesn’t need to be an unsightly towering pile of rot and debris, destroying the aesthetics of your backyard. You could buy a small composting bin with lid, or better yet an untreated, non-toxic urbanmac* macrocarpa compost bin, enabling you to supply rich nutrients to your vegetable patch.
- SqueEKO clean. Refrain from cleaning the heck out of every surface with toxic and potent chemicals. Food often makes contact with your bench-tops so be mindful of what you are cleaning your kitchen with; why risk your health absorbing McNasties? Buy non-toxic green cleaners or make your own!
- When filling the fridge and pantry we often go for the best deals, the cheapest bulk goods on offer—at the expense of the environment and our health. Start out small, by trying to replace 1-2 items of food each week with an organic product. Perhaps use less to reduce the cost. At the moment I am focussing on going organic with baking products, I've replaced oats, white, wholemeal and self-raising flours with organic options. Source locally grown produce from farmers markets. In Auckland, Affordable Organix delivers incredible value-for-money organic produce on Mondays, saving you time AND providing fresh in-season goodness.
* Holly Jean is part owner of Urbanmac
Fri October 22, 2010 @ 09:43 AM
