The (Almost) Zero-Waste Guide

by Melanie Mannarino

  Bring your own to-go containers.

  Not as hungry as you thought? Couldn’t resist the entree special of the day? (Or, even more tempting, those buy-one, take-one-home meal deals some chain restaurants offer?) Not a problem: just make sure to tuck an earth-friendly to-go container into your bag before you leave home. Then, after your meal, depending on the fancy-factor of the restaurant, you can either gently push your leftovers from your plate into your container or ask the server to do it for you in the kitchen. A stainless steel container with a tight seal makes for a smart, durable option.

  Skip the takeout.

  Treat yourself—and the planet—right by skipping takeout or delivery meals. To-go food usually arrives in a plastic or paper bag (sometimes one nestled within the other), in one or more plastic, cardboard, or Styrofoam containers—sometimes divided by pieces of cardboard for stability—along with plastic utensils and paper napkins. Instead, make a meal at home or dine at the takeout joint, where you can bring your own utensils, cloth napkin, and to-go container for leftovers if you’d like.

  Brew your dark roast at home.

  Whether you’re a pour-over fanatic or more “cold brew or bust,” making your own coffee drinks at home (and transporting them in your favorite reusable beverage holder) is the easiest way to get your fix, eliminate the waste that comes from to-go joe (paper cups, plastic lids, store receipts), and retain control over the coffee waste that comes from brewing in any setting. Compost slow-decomposing coffee grounds to add nitrogen and other nutrients to your mix, and possibly even attract more worms (which are essential for aeration, keeping your fertilizer-to-be extra healthy). Just don’t get any DIY body scrub ideas: coffee grounds are notorious for clogging drains.

  Switch to loose-leaf tea.

  Many (but not all) tea manufacturers have switched from plastic tea bags to paper ones in recent years, but there is still concern over the glue used to seal each bag, which may not be biodegradable.7 What that means for you: it will never fully decompose in a landfill or in your compost. To truly reduce waste, make the switch to loose-leaf teas. They often come in decorative, reusable tins (or you could always bring your own to your new favorite loose-leaf tea retailer), and in more varieties and blends than you’d find on a typical supermarket shelf. To make a cup, place the suggested serving of tea leaves in a stainless steel tea ball, drop into your hot water to steep, and enjoy!

  Buy in bulk.

  No, we’re not talking about buying a huge box of single-serving snacks from the nearest warehouse club. You can actually find bulk bins of grain, beans, nuts, dried fruit, coffee, tea, flour, sugar, and even prepared foods like cereals and granolas at both larger supermarkets and smaller independent markets. Some co-ops and other indie markets even offer liquids like vinegar and oil in bulk, and some nut butters. Check a store’s website or drop in before buying to see if they have any restrictions on customers bringing their own containers. Once you know the rules, bring your own cloth bags, glass jars, or other zero-waste-friendly containers and ask the salesperson to weigh (tare) your container before you add food to it so you don’t get charged extra for the weight of your container. And make sure to label your jars so you remember what you’ve got once you bring it home—using a grease pencil or glass-marking pencil directly on the container will do the trick without creating more waste.

  Maximize meats.

  Like other groceries, meats (chicken, beef, fish—whatever) can often be purchased using your own container. Just ask at your local supermarket, butcher, or farm-stand vendor. In the kitchen, take tonight’s dinner from a “single-use” meal to a repurposed one: save bones in the freezer until you have enough to simmer with water and aromatics to make your own stock. Likewise, shrimp and lobster shells—as well as the cooking liquid from steamed mussels and clams—make excellent seafood stock.

  Steer clear of single-serving packages.

  Yes, they offer built-in portion control—but with that convenience comes excess packaging, whether plastic containers or bags, metal wrappers, or additional cardboard. A better way to divvy up crackers and other snacks: buy the largest package available (after checking the bulk bins first), then portion everything into stainless steel containers, silicone zip-top bags, or small, reusable glass jars (like repurposed baby food jars, pickle jars, jam jars, or salsa jars).

  When in doubt, choose glass or metal over plastic.

  Every once in a while, you may encounter a food or condiment you can’t buy in bulk. When that happens, opt for the version that comes in a glass or metal container, rather than a plastic one. A glass jar, in particular, can be repurposed in dozens of different practical and decorative ways once emptied and cleaned. Here are just a few ideas:

  Desktop organizer (for pens, pencils, scissors, etc.)

  Vanity organizer (for nail files, makeup pencils, and brushes)

  Vase

  Drinking glass

  Salad dressing container

  Seashell display

  Mini terrarium

  Dried herb and spice containers

  Mini herb garden

  Sand art

  Stash reusable bags everywhere.

  In your car. In your bicycle basket. In your tote bag, backpack, or briefcase. In your handbag. This ensures that you’ll never have to accept a paper or plastic bag when you make a purchase from a grocery store or farmers’ market. And when you use one (or more), as soon as you bring them into the house and unpack your items, immediately return the bags to where they came from. (Because a reusable bag can’t help save the planet if it’s tucked away in your coat closet.)

  But don’t go out and buy new reusable bags.

  We think of thin plastic shopping bags as the height of environmental waste, but some research8 has determined that the process used to manufacture reusable totes (cotton or otherwise) has a larger negative impact on water use, air pollution, climate change, and ozone depletion.9 In fact, according to the Life Cycle Assessment Study of Grocery Carrier Bags conducted by the Ministry of Environment and Food of Denmark, an organic cotton tote would have to be reused 149 times to equal the climate change impact of a plastic bag. The practical takeaway? If you have plastic bags in your home, use them as often as possible before dropping them into a recycling bin (look for specific boxes at your grocery store, or check to see if there are central drop-off points at your town hall or public library). And if you have totes made of cotton or other textiles, use them again and again, too—just don’t rush out and buy a new trove of eco-friendly bags, because you might be doing more harm than good.

  How Clean Is That Reusable Bag?

  BAGS—especially those used to tote produce, meats, and other groceries—get dirty. A reusable shopping bag study10 conducted by Dr. Ryan Sinclair of Arizona’s Loma Linda University found large amounts of bacteria present in nearly all bags, and E. coli in 12 percent of them. Worse, bags contaminated by meat juices for two hours and then left in a warm environment had ten times the amount of bacteria. Gross, yes—but the study also found that hand or machine washing reduced the bacteria in bags by more than 99.9 percent. For non-machine-washable bags, spritzing a food-safe antibacterial cleanser on the interior and thoroughly wiping with a cloth might be enough. But for all others, frequent machine washing can keep your bags bacteria free—and keep you from getting sick.

  Grow your own food.

  If you’ve got a sunny windowsill, you can grow herbs. A balcony? Planter tomatoes. A patch in your yard? Any fruit or vegetable you want (that happens to thrive in your geographical location). The simplest way to lessen your environmental footprint is to grow your own food, right in your own backyard. The “farm”-to-table distance couldn’t be shorter, you control everything from seeds to soil (so there’s no chance of carcinogenic fertilizers or insecticides being used), and you’ll naturally eat seasonally. What’s more, you can compost produce scraps and sometimes the plants themselves (as long as they aren’t diseased) at the end of the season, then use that compo
st to nourish next year’s crop. The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists ten of the easiest vegetables to grow from seed:11 beans, beets, carrots, cucumbers, kale, lettuce, peas, pumpkins, radishes, and squash.

  Eat with the seasons.

  The shorter the distance a fruit or vegetable travels from the farm to your table, the smaller the environmental impact it has. While that might mean that those of us in a four-season climate have to deny our blueberry cravings in the dead of winter, it will result in less fuel waste. One easy way to do this is to shop your farmers’ market—everything there should be local and seasonal. If there are no year-round farmers’ markets in your area, keep an eye out for labels indicating “local produce” at your supermarket. As more people become aware of the impact of buying a tomato that’s traveled across at least one continent before purchase, stores are becoming increasingly transparent about where a fruit or vegetable was grown.

  Cook with fruit and vegetable scraps.

  Did you know that radish tops, ramp tops (ramps are cousins of leeks and shallots), and beet greens all make delicious pesto? Carrot greens can be sautéed with garlic and oil like spinach or kale, or blended into a flavorful chimichurri sauce. You can also eat the leaves of turnips, broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts (just remove the tough ribs first)—like sweet potato leaves, they’re good sautéed or added to soups. Another zero-waste soup tip: chopped lacinato (dinosaur) kale stems add tender-crunchy body and texture to bean and other soups. Other creative ways to eat the parts of fruits and vegetables we usually discard:

  Pickled watermelon rind: In a boiled brine of vinegar, sugar, and spices like cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and clove

  Vegetable broth: Save the ends of carrots, onions, celery, and other vegetables—and the stems of herbs like parsley—in the freezer till you have enough to make a flavorful broth

  Vanilla sugar: Add the scraped-out pod to a container of granulated sugar and store until fragrant

  Candied citrus peel: Bring to a boil, then simmer in a 1:1 sugar-water solution

  Fried potato peels: Deep-fry or air fry, then season with salt and your favorite spice mix

  Stir-fried broccoli stalk “coins”: Peel thick stems before cooking and then compost the peels

  Corn cob chowder: Use corn cobs to make a flavorful corn stock with onion, celery, and other aromatics and then add puréed and whole kernels to the chowder toward the end

  Give other food scraps a second life.

  Stale bread makes great bread crumbs (pulse in a food processor and then freeze until needed) or croutons (cube, toss with oil, garlic, and herbs, and then bake), as well as French toast, berry pudding, or savory strata. Hard cheese rinds like Parmesan and pecorino romano can be frozen and then thrown into your next batch of soup as the broth simmers for rich umami flavor.

  Menu plan.

  A little menu planning goes a long way in an (almost) zero-waste lifestyle. When you plot out your meals, you can then make detailed grocery lists and buy only what you need and know you will eat. Love leftovers? Plan to double your recipe and eat it for days. Hate leftovers? Adjust your recipe to make only the number of portions you need for one meal. Look at your calendar and map out what days you can cook and eat at home, how many others in your household will be eating the food, and how much time you have to prepare (a Tuesday night might not be the best time to make a vegetarian cassoulet from scratch). If you food shop only at the beginning of the week, plan to use your most perishable ingredients earlier in the week (think chicken, fish, and already-ripe vegetables) and save the hardier ones for week’s end (beans and grains).

  Why Meatless Monday Is a Thing

  Meatless Monday might seem like a modern solution to reducing the amount of greenhouse-gas-producing meat we eat, but it actually got started during World War I as a way to reduce consumption, according to the Monday Campaigns, an organization that brought back the idea in 200312 as a means of improving the health of Americans (who now eat an average of seventy-five more pounds of meat per year than previous generations). Today, Meatless Monday is practiced around the world, not only for personal health reasons but also to reduce the environmental impact of meat-eating on the planet. According to a 2018 study,13 while more than 80 percent of farmland is used for livestock, it results in just 18 percent of food calories and 37 percent of protein. What’s more, livestock raised for beef contribute twelve times more greenhouse-gas emissions than dairy cows, which in turn produce twenty-six times more than peas. If you want to reduce waste in the form of greenhouse gases, cutting back your meat consumption is a smart step.

  Reuse cooking water.

  Let your cooking water cool before storing it in the fridge for a second use. Save starchy pasta water to give extra body to puréed soups (like chowders and squash-, potato-, and cauliflower-based blends). Repurpose water used to boil vegetables as a base for homemade stocks. If the water is unsalted, you can even use it to water your herb, fruit and vegetable, or flower garden.

  Compost whatever food scraps are left.

  On first thought, it might seem unnecessary to compost your food scraps unless you have a garden that would benefit from the nutrient-rich fertilizer/soil conditioner it creates. After all, food decomposes, whether in a public landfill or your backyard compost heap, right? While that’s all true on the surface, the truth is a lot, well, deeper. When food scraps go into your kitchen garbage bag and get hauled to the dump, they end up being buried deep within other piles of refuse and decomposing without oxygen. This oxygen-free decomposition produces methane gas, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. In contrast, food scraps that are composted (by you or your community) have the opportunity to decompose in an oxygen-rich environment, so they break down without releasing methane.

  Food scraps and yard waste (also compostable) currently make up 30 percent of landfill waste in the United States,14 according to the EPA. Composting can help drive that percentage down and keep our air cleaner. Plus, it also gives you an amazing soil supplement you can use in your herb and vegetable garden or flower beds. Your food scraps get a second life and help new plants grow and flourish; it’s an all-around win. It’s also easy to get started: you need a small container for your kitchen, where you can stash food scraps as you cook and prep, as well as a large outdoor compost container, where the decomposition magic will happen.

  Some people keep a small lidded canister or bin right on their countertops, where they can throw scraps throughout the day. You can buy a canister made for compost scraps (some come with a charcoal filter to reduce odors), or you can repurpose one of your own. To reduce the possibility of attracting fruit flies or other insects, take your compost out daily. Some composters find that storing scraps in the fridge or freezer also keeps bugs away.

  To compost your scraps outdoors, you can buy a compost container or create your own using repurposed wooden fencing, pallets, a plastic garbage bin, or another container. (You don’t even need a yard for this—if you’ve got room on a balcony, try it!) The essential ingredients for successful compost are carbon, nitrogen, moisture, and air. Layering in different compost materials can give you the proper mix of carbon and nitrogen, and keeping the soil damp and turning it frequently will help everything decompose properly. A few things cannot be composted, including pet waste, animal products (dairy or meat), and any yard clippings or plants treated with pesticides. Otherwise, here’s the list of materials you can safely compost:

  Nitrogen-rich Compostable Materials15

  Sawdust

  Wood chips

  Pine needles

  Dried leaves

  Straw

  Recycled paper and cardboard

  Dried grass

  Shredded paper

  Shredded newspaper

  Potting soil

  Carbon-rich Compostable Materials

  Fruit and vegetable scraps

  Citrus rinds

  Coffee grounds and filters

  Non-greasy rice, pasta, bread, cereal
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  Tea bags (make sure the bags are compostable; see page 7 for more details)

  Egg and nut shells

  Pits

  Cut or dried flowers

  Houseplants

  Soiled brown paper products

  Make your own baby food.

  While you’re cooking vegetables and other whole foods for the night or the week, why not purée a batch for the little one? Your pediatrician can give you a list of starter foods appropriate for your baby’s age and stage. After that, shop your garden, your CSA box, or your local market for the best produce available, and then cook and purée it to the right consistency. Store it in freezer-safe canning jars or freeze individual portions in ice cube trays and use as needed.

  Buy a seltzer maker.

  If bubbles are your life, you have two options: keep buying the largest-size plastic or glass bottle of sparkling water you can find, or buy a seltzer maker so you can have bubbles on demand at all times, served from your own reusable bottle. To feel better about the purchase, consider the typical number of bottles of sparkling water you go through in a month, multiply that by twelve, and imagine those bottles lined up next to a seltzer machine. A machine will last you years, and the only materials you’ll need to recycle are the CO2 cartridges that give your beverage its fizz.