Five Tips to Reduce Food Waste in Your Home

In a recent article on food waste by e-magazine, they cited that roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year—approximately 1.3 billion tons—gets lost or wasted. This was based on the report, FAO report Global Food Losses and Food Waste, which was released May 2011. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that Americans are responsible for most of this food waste—more than 34 million tons of food was tossed in the U.S. in 2009, which amounted to more than 14% of the nation’s total municipal solid waste stream. And only 3% of food scraps are recycled into compost—the remaining 97% is sent to landfills where it rarely decomposes and instead rots and produces harmful methane gas which contributes to global warming.

Here are top 5 tips you can do to reduce food waste in your home;

1. Create a Shopping List and Menu Plan: Plan out the week of meals and figure out how much you need to purchase for your family. You will reduce food waste by only buying what you need.
2. Make Smoothies: instead of throwing away wilted veggies or fruit, convert them into a smoothie. Go to Smoothie Recipes for some ideas.
3. Buy Only What You Need: consider purchasing in bulk, when possible, and only buy the quantities of food that you need. You can also freeze un-used fruit and vegetables and use them at a later time.
4. Compost: The best way not to feel guilty about throwing away unused food, is to compost it. Consider getting a home-based composter for your yard. Go to composters.com which has a broad range of composters plus information on how to get started.
5. Portion Control: Start with smaller portion helpings on plates and let each family member take more if they want. This is the quickest way to reduce food waste.

DIVE! is an excellent movie on food waste. Learn more about it on our past blog post DIVE!.

Conduct Your Own Trash Log

I just finished a week long trash log. This is an exercise I ask of my clients and thought I better to do it myself. I wrote down each and every piece of trash that I had and what I did with it– recycled, composted or re-used or discarded. Then, with items I had to discard I wrote down alternative options for the future. Although I consider myself a trash ‘connoisseur’ I discovered through this exercise even how I can get better with my own waste. If you haven’t done it yet, I would highly encourage anyone to track their trash for a week. You will discover not only how much trash you really do accumulate but you will gain more consciousness before throwing it away. I’d love to hear your experience of conducting a trash log.