More Tips for Green Kitchens

There are a lot of little things that we can do to make our kitchens green. Almost everything that we do in the kitchen can be more eco-friendly not to mention budget-friendly and safer for our health.

First, take a look at your cleansers—your soap dish and the liquid that you use for cleaning your sink. You can use natural cleansers such as baking soda or you can choose cleansers that do not have harmful chemicals such as lye and phosphates. Lye was studied to be carcinogenic while phosphates (the chemical that makes our dish soap sudsy kills water and all water living organisms including fish).

How about our table napkins and paper towels in the kitchen? We can buy recycled ones. Every time we buy napkins and paper towels that are not recycled, we are contributing to the denudation of our forests. Large logging companies supply a bulk of their logs to the makers of table napkins.

If all of us will do this, imagine how many trees we will save. If there are 1 million households who stop using new table napkins that are from trees and not from recycled papers, there will be millions more trees in our forests.

The non-stick pan use chemicals to coat our pan. When we scrub them, the chemicals get washed off and they go to our water bodies. We can use stainless pots instead. They are healthier (no chemicals leach while we’re cooking) and they are easier to clean than non-stick pans.

How much trash do we make in our kitchen? Probably a lot everyday. We can reduce our trash by segregating the biodegradable wastes like the pared vegetable skins or excess food and make a compost pit in your backyards. There are some villages and residential communities who organize environmental drive that turn biodegradable wastes to natural fertilizers.

Turning our kitchens from ordinary to green kitchens doesn’t necessarily need to be expensive. Little changes in the things that we are using can mean a lot of difference. If each one of us will reduce our kitchen wastes by 1 kilo every day, we will have at most 60 million kilos of reduced wastes when we add them all together. Now, I don’t know how many tons are those but I’m pretty sure it’s a LOT!

Tagged as: green kitchens