11 Eco Swaps to Make Your Kitchen ECO
There are many aspects to reducing your environmental impact on the world. Sometimes it takes changing habits, sometimes it takes replacing environmentally UNfriendly things with eco-friendly options, and sometimes it takes both. But one thing is certain: there are many ways to make your life more eco and if you try to tackle everything at once, it can easily become overwhelming and leave you feeling frustrated. You might even end up just deciding it’s impossible to change and decide you can’t. This is why I always try to focus on the long term and make small steps: lots of small changes over weeks, months, or even years is still much more environmentally-friendly than trying something for 1 week and giving up, especially if the changes stick for the rest of your life!
One way that you can break down going eco into small steps is by just choosing to do one room of your house at a time. In the past, I did a blog post on eco swaps you can make in your bathroom. Today, I want to focus on a different room: the kitchen.
Eco Baddies in the Kitchen
The kitchen is one part of your home that can produce a lot of greenhouse gases and waste. The biggest three being:
Plastics
Many of the tools that we use in the kitchen are widely available in cheap plastic form, which is great for our wallets, but not so great for the environment since those plastics will exist forever in the environment after you throw them away. Most of us also use single-use plastics without even really thinking about it. We tend to think of “single-use plastics” as things like plastic forks/spoons/straws, but there are some in your kitchen that you probably use regularly like plastic wrap and plastic bags that you put veggies in at the supermarket. If you can eliminate sources of plastic waste in your home, you absolutely should!
Paper Products
Mass-produced, single-use paper products have a slew of environmentally-detrimental effects: the sheer number of trees cut down (51,000 trees per day just to supply paper towels to the US alone), the large amount of water used in the production process, and the fact that they are only used once, then thrown away to rot and produce further greenhouse gas emissions. Any reduction in paper products can have great environmental benefits!
Greenhouse Gases
Our kitchen also produces some greenhouse gases that we have to stay aware of. Electrical appliances indirectly emit large amounts of CO2 into the environment. Why? Because you probably get your power from the electrical grid, which is still mostly powered by fossil fuels here in the USA. The biggest consumers of electricity in the kitchen (and possibly in your whole house) are the microwave and the refrigerator.
The next big emitter is your stove: this one’s a no-brainer; you’re literally burning fossil fuels in your kitchen!
Finally, our food waste. 30-40% of food in the USA is thrown into landfills, creating greenhouse gases (primarily methane, which is 84 times more potent than CO2!) that lead to climate change so any reduction in food waste is going to be a huge help to the environment. We can accomplish this with better food storage and better management of the foods we do end up throwing away.
11 Eco Swaps to Make Your Kitchen ECO
We’ve now seen there is a lot of area for improvement in any kitchen! So what are the ways we can fight climate change and plastic waste in our kitchen? What are some products that help us do it? Let’s look at 11 eco swaps you can make in your kitchen!
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1. Glass Jars/Containers (Airtight)
Keeping your food from spoiling an underrated way to reduce your impact on climate change! And one way to keep foods lasting longer and prevent things like cereals from going stale is airtight containers or glass jars. Especially if you are lucky enough to have a zero-waste store nearby that sells bulk foods!
Glass jars like these also have a great, minimalist look that I like so much more than gaudy branded plastic disposable containers.
If you do one want something that is a little more solidly airtight, you can always try airtight containers like these.
2. Silicone Stretch Lids
Plastic wrap is one of the big kitchen plastics that can be hard to escape from. It’s so easy to use and convenient that I felt for a long time that it was one that would be hard to ditch, but my worries that ditching plastic wrap were pretty much solved by these silicone stretch lids. You can get them in different shapes and sizes to fit over almost any bowl or plate and keep your foods from spoiling for longer!
3. Reusable Ziplock Bags
Ziplock bags are another single-use kitchen plastic that many people use on a daily basis. If you still have some laying around, you can actually wash and reuse regular ziplock bags quite a few times, but if you’re all out and looking to buy more, reusable versions are now gaining popularity. They’re basically hardier ziplock bags, meaning that you can wash and reuse them even more!
4. Beeswax wraps
Beeswax wraps are the other half of my solution to eliminating plastic wrap from my kitchen. For all the things that silicone stretch lids didn’t cover (loose fruits and veggies, oddly shaped plates and bowls, etc), the beeswax wrap does the job. It’s a little hard at first, but with just the warmth of your hands, you can shape it into whatever shape you want, and then after using them, you can just wash and dry them to be reused!
5. Washcloths
Paper towels were a big source of waste in my kitchen. They’re amazingly convenient and I used to reach for one for almost any spill. Unfortunately, they’re a little too convenient and led to a lot of unnecessary waste, which is not great for the environment. This led me to search for an alternative, which in this case is a no-brainer for many: simple washcloths. Just keeping a few of these around the kitchen has helped stop my hand from reaching for those paper towels as often. Wash, reuse, be eco. And if you feel weird buying new towels just for cleaning up spills, cut up an old towel to make some makeshift washcloths.
Another choice is to just keep using paper towels, but not ones made from trees! You can get ones that are made from bamboo instead if you want to level up your paper towel eco-game.
6. Biodegradable Garbage Bags
There’s one other plastic product that we regularly put in the garbage: the garbage bag itself! These days there are alternatives that are being developed that are made from different materials including plant-based and seaweed-based plastics that biodegrade over time. Unfortunately, they’re still more expensive than traditional garbage bags, but the more people buy them, the more demand will increase and prices will drop as the industry is pushed towards more eco-friendly products.
7. Wooden Utensils
Plastic is great for its ability to last long, but I’ve yet to meet a plastic spatula that I didn’t have to throw out after a couple years. This is another place where we can cut our plastic production and replace plastic with something that biodegrades. Wooden sets are available for various prices depending on the quality of the wood, but bamboo options can be just as cheap as plastic counterparts, while being a great eco-friendly alternative.
8. Reusable Produce Bags
When you go to the supermarket, do you put your fruits and veggies into those plastic bags they have sitting at the end of each aisle? Try swapping them out for reusable ones that you can take home, put straight into the fridge, then wash and reuse when you’re done!
9. Composter
There are a whole host of benefits that come from running a composter in your backyard: they greatly cut down on methane produced from food rot, they provide you with great fertilizer for your garden, and they cut down the amount of garbage that you produce in your kitchen. This one is a bit of an investment, but particularly if you are big on gardening (which you should be, it’s super environmentally-friendly and cheap to produce your own fresh veggies! For more info on why this cuts down on your carbon footprint, read my blog post on The Carbon Footprint of a Strawberry.), you should invest in a kitchen countertop compost bin and something like this outdoor tumbling composter to start cutting your kitchen’s methane production!
10. Turkish Coffee Maker or Moka Pot
I’m a huge coffee-addict. The first part of my morning routine is making coffee to start my day. But for many people, this is also a place that produces a lot of waste, especially if you use one of the pod-based coffee makers. Coffee filters, plastic coffee pods, and disposable coffee bags all add up to your kitchen’s daily waste. And it’s all totally unnecessary since there are many low- or zero-waste options out there for brewing your coffee, so do a quick google search for which one you’d be interested in trying and give one a shot! I personally use a Moka pot, and think that it makes much better coffee than any machine out there.
Some people also prefer getting a Turkish coffee maker, which come in cheap and simple versions and more fancy and expensive versions.
Note also that if you DO like the convenience of the pod-based coffee makers, buy a set of reusable coffee pods that you can wash and reuse to eliminate that plastic pod waste! WARNING: make sure that the pods you buy are made to fit your machine! The newer Keurigs come with sensors that won’t make coffee for reusable pods.
11. Energy-Efficient Appliances
This eco swap is the one that takes the biggest commitment and financial investment, but will also have the biggest impact! Swapping out your refrigerator, stove, and microwave to newer, energy-saving options will make a huge impact not just on your carbon footprint, but on your electric bill as well! Swapping to an energy-efficient refrigerator can save up to $100 per year on your electric bill. Swapping your gas-burning stove for an electric-based induction stove can take some getting used to in the kitchen, but they have a much smaller carbon footprint than their natural gas-burning cousins.
11 Eco Swaps to Make Your Kitchen ECO Quick List:
- Glass Jars | Airtight Containers
- Silicone Stretch Lids
- Reusable Zipper Bags
- Beeswax Wraps
- Washcloths | Bamboo Paper Towels
- Plant-based Garbage Bags
- Wooden Kitchen Utensils | Bamboo Kitchen Utensils
- Reusable Produce Bags
- Kitchen Countertop Compost Bin | Tumblings Composter
- Moka Pot | Basic Turkish Coffee Maker | Traditional Turkish Coffee Maker
- Energy-Efficient Refrigerator | Microwave | Induction Stove
How eco is your kitchen?
What are some eco swaps that you’ve made in your kitchen that I didn’t mention? Are there some other ways you can help me make MY kitchen more ECO? Let me know in the comments below!
Still looking for more products to make your home ECO? Check out my blog post on 10 Eco Swaps to Make Your Bathroom ECO.