A moment on the lips. An eternity where? Food waste is a big deal for your pantry, budget and the planet. 

You’re not going to love this week’s challenge. Next time you visit the grocery store I want you to come home and before you take the bags inside to the kitchen toss half of them into the trash can. That’s right; if you’ve bought four bags, throw two away. If you’ve bought eight bags, chuck out four of them. You get the picture.

Crazy right?

Well according to a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, this is exactly what we’re doing because Americans waste every other mouthful of food.

Stop for a moment. Don’t just read on, stuffing this golden McNugget of information into a brain where it doesn’t touch the sides. Stop. Think. Feel…

Every. Other. Mouthful.

Half. 

Three out of six grocery bags.

Has it sunk in yet? Have you tasted the ridiculousness of the situation we’re in?

Many people make the assumption that tossing food in a landfill is ok; it’s a natural product that composts down. The trouble is when air doesn’t get to the food (such as when it’s been wrapped in a plastic bag and has a ton of other stuff sitting on top of it in a landfill site) it decomposes and produces methane gas instead. Hello global warming!

But it’s not just that, is it? What a terrible waste of resources – resources you might not even think about such as water, fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, packaging, transportation, energy to run greenhouses… then there’s your money; money you’ve worked hard to earn, perhaps you’ve sat at your desk and missed your child take his first steps so that you can throw money away on food you toss in the garbage can.

This month, I’m asking you to rise to the challenge of overhauling your food habits. Traditionally autumn is the time of harvest where long hours would be spent picking, storing and preserving foods for the winter. With supermarket shopping available to us 24/7 we no longer need to worry about harvesting; we simply go out and buy more. I’m not asking you to go back to living off the land, but to be more reverent about food in general.

We’re told we will face food shortages in our lifetime but I’m not so sure. Maybe if people in the Western world were more thoughtful and less hasty there would be enough to feed everyone for a very long time.

Here are six ideas for reducing food waste to get you started.

• Start your day with a smoothie made from anything going wrinkly in the fruit bowl
• Use your leftovers in the following day’s lunch box – rice or pasta salads are delicious
• Menu plan; brainstorm your family’s favorite meals and plan this week’s meals around them
• Make old veggies into soup or pasta sauces
• Don’t shop when you’re hungry; seriously – you’ll end up buying more than you need
• Never judge a book by its cover; we’ve been conditioned to judge everything by appearance but check out this brown banana and moldy pineapple

I know you creative people out there have plenty more to share. Let me know what you’re planning in the comments below!

The post The Zero Waste Trash Challenge: Our Personal Food Crisis appeared first on EcoSalon.

Adding recycling to errands you already do attaches a new habit to a bad one. 

Last month I encouraged you to part company with your trash can and set up a recycling center. That old faithful friend who has been happily eating your garbage for the past however many years needs to go if you are ever going to get your trash to a trim size zero. We also imparted the mantra “Wash and squash” for rinsing and compacting your recyclable materials, another skinny trick.

By now your recycling containers are probably overflowing at a rate that surpasses regular curbside pick-up. With summer temperatures soaring you don’t want to be hanging onto things much longer, so here’s where this month’s challenge comes in: It’s time to get out your calender for a little forward planning.

Let’s face it: there is little point washing, squashing and storing your recyclables only to make a special journey to the recycling center. By the time you’ve burned gas and belched out your carbon emissions into the atmosphere, you may as well have well kept your kitchen bin and chucked everything in the landfill.

So this month, take a look at your schedule. Peruse your calendars for work commitments, errands, gym visits, visits to friends and families and anything else you are doing. Do any of these take you past a local recycling center? You can find them via Recycle Now in the UK  or 1-800-Recycling in the U.S.

Once you’ve found the perfect opportunity, mark it in your diary or schedule it on your smartphone, then make a commitment to yourself and the environment. The next time you are going past a recycling center, you will leave your home ten minutes earlier and take your recycling with you.

It couldn’t be simpler.

You might be able to squeeze in a visit between pumping iron at the gym and picking up the kids or perhaps you can stop on your way home from work or the supermarket. By adding recycling to errands you already do this makes it more convenient and less likely that you’ll forget. One of the best ways to put a new habit into place is to attach it to something you already do.

For more from the Zero Waste Trash Challenge, check out:

First Stop: A Bin Audit
Just Say No (To Plastic Bags)
The Five Step Program for Better Recycling
Set Up a Recycling Center Based on Your Habits

Image: Signal Station; Gosia Malochleb, Peter Kaminski

The post The Zero Waste Trash Challenge: Better Recycling Goes Beyond Curbside appeared first on EcoSalon.

The hardest part of the Zero Waste Challenge is making a conscious decision and sticking to it.

Assuming you persevered through your bin audit – any horror stories to tell? – you should now be aware of how much you are throwing away and what your top five wasters are. If you haven’t already done so, let us know in the comments below.

My top five landfill lay-a-bouts were plastic milk bottles, yogurt cartons, food waste, plastic bags and aluminum foil.

I promised this month’s challenge would be much easier, less messy and something most of you are doing already. But before my family got started, it was the last straw in the trash pile that finally got my husband on board.

Say No to Disposable Plastic Carrier Bags

Think about the absurdity of plastic carrier bags for a moment. It’s believed that oil takes hundreds of thousands of years to produce. We extract it and make it into a carrier bag, which we use for the duration of one shopping trip. For most shoppers, that carrier bag is filled with things to be wheeled from the checkout line to the car, then hauled from the car to our kitchen: a total of 5 minutes. After that we throw the bag in the trash where it ends up in the landfill and takes around 500 years to decompose.

So let’s get this straight: We take something that has taken hundreds of thousands of years to produce, use it for five minutes then leave it for another 500 years to decompose?

Not a good use of resources.

But that’s not all. Our oceans are now a soup of plastic consisting of slivers of plastic that have broken down into smaller and smaller pieces. These slivers end up in the food chain: the fish eat the plastic and we eat the fish. Hardly a foodie trend we should want to partake in.

Sadly, for marine life like turtles and albatross, things aren’t quite so good. They mistakenly ingest plastic bags or get caught up in them, resulting in a painful death.

There is no need to use a disposable plastic bag when there are so many options. Our shops are bursting at the seams with beautiful, sustainable shopping bags made from organic cotton, jute and repurposed materials like rice sacks.

If you’re good with a sewing machine, put your fabric stash to good use and make a morsbag. Reuse cardboard boxes and stack them in the car.
Get a beautiful wicker basket and carry it proudly on your arm.
Even consider reusing your plastic carrier bags until they are no longer useful.

Next, the challenging bit: make a conscious effort to remember to take your bag alternatives to the store with you.

Are you up for this month’s challenge? Show your commitment by leaving a comment below.

Images: Ars Electronica; Ocean Resources; ailatan

The post The Zero Waste Trash Challenge: Just Say No (To Plastic Bags) appeared first on EcoSalon.