Kitchen scraps.  The festering food that makes your bin smell bad and languishes in landfill producing greenhouse gas that will further warm our planet and jeopardise our future.  So, what should you do with these scraps?

The London Boroughs of Ealing, Hounslow and Richmond have taken the initiative and are collecting kitchen waste from the doorsteps a quarter of a million west London homes and taking it away to be turned into electricity through anaerobic digestion. With the food scraps being recycled in this way they don’t end up in landfill somewhere producing methane, and the process is enough to continuously power almost 3,000 homes. [source: edie]

It would be amazing to see this initiative rolled-out throughout the UK, but in the meantime, what are we to do if we don’t live in the areas where this is happening? Compost your kitchen waste, yes, all of it, with one of these clever little kitchen composters that take meat, carbohydrates and dairy products as well as the usual fruit and vegetable peelings. You can add cooked food to these composters, making them far more efficient than “regular” composting methods, and you won’t end up with a smelly bin full of fish bones and chicken skins, because you can put those in your kitchen composter too.

Here’s how it works:

The beginning of the English summer holds so much promise.  Tiny green things are coming up everywhere and there’s so much potential to make your lifestyle greener too.

Get out into the garden and plant yourself some food (you can do this even if you don’t have a garden), or even a tree.

Equip yourself with a homemade recycled tyre trug,

Light your garden with the power of the sun.

Install a water butt.

Start composting.

If you don’t have a garden, why not find out about getting an allotment?

Growing your own food can save you loads of money every month.

Photo credit: Robert S Donovan

Christmas is only a few days away now (as my little daughter keeps reminding me), so it’s time to get the Chrimbo-dinner ready to go.  There are a few rules that will make any festive feast a whole lot greener.  These are them:

1. Buy less food: less food = less waste, you do the maths.

2. Buy local:  if that’s not available, buy organic or Fairtrade.

3. Recycle:  recycle all food packaging.

4. Compost: all organic waste (you can compost meat and other cooked food with a food digester).

5. Buy loose: rather than pre-packaged.  There’s less waste that way.

The ghostliest night of the year is over and what are you going to be doing with the pumpkin that you carved to delight the trick or treaters in your neighbourhood.  You can let it fester on the front doorstep until it turns into mush and is rather difficult to scrape into a plastic bag or similar to put it into the bin, or you can put it in your composter and make it into nutritious compost for your garden.  It wouldn’t be a bad idea to smash your pumpkin up a bit (Smashing Pumpkins, I always wondered where that name came from) before putting it into your composter to increase it’s surface area exposed to the air which will help it break down faster.

Don’t own a composter?  Here are your options:

1. Dig a hole.  Put your smashed pumpkin in it (and other compostable material).  Cover with soil and plant something over it.

2. Try the Berkley Thermophilic Compost method for super quick compost.  Watch the video for how to do it.

3. Make a composter.  Here are some plans to get you started.

4. Take your pick from the great range of composters available to buy.

The food waste that we throw away in the UK generates around 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.  Decrease your carbon footprint by diverting your organic kitchen waste into a Bokashi kitchen composter.

The Bokashi composts meat, fish, dairy produce and cooked food, as well as raw food.  They promise that there is no smell and no flies, so the composter is perfect for flat dwellers.  Use your compost in window-boxes or on a balcony or roof garden.  It’s advisable to use two of these composters in tandem, so that you’ve got one cooking while you’re filling the other one up.  They cost £29.99 each.

Wherever you turn people are talking about the credit crunch.  Most of us are feeling the pinch in one way or another, and so we’re coming up with clever ways to save money.  Most of these ideas have been around for ages, but because of a consumer economy that brings us goods at prices that don’t reflect the real costs of manufacture, and because of cheap oil, many of us have not had to scrimp and save like our parents or grandparents may have had to.

1. Buy in bulk

Here’s an idea that’s been around for a while.  Buy in bulk.  Get together with friends and do it, or if you have the space, just do it yourself.  And if you think that those organic or eco-friendly products are too expensive to afford these days, buy them in bulk to save.

2. Turn your thermostat down

Okay, it’s not time to switch the heating on yet, but you can turn down the heat of your water in the meantime.  And when it’s time for the heating to go on, turn that thermostat down a couple of degrees.  Put on a fleece or a jumper and be toasty warm.

3. Shower, and keep it short

Showering saves lots of water (and also energy used to heat the water), but only if you keep it short.  Keep showers under 5 minutes, and take a navy shower.

4. Make do and mend

Before you buy something new because the old one is outdated, think about it.  What values are you supporting by buying into mindless consumerism based not on what you need but what you desire?  If something breaks, see if you can fix it, rather than buy a new one.  And if something is no longer suitable for one job, perhaps it can be repurposed to save you money somewhere else.

5.  Stay organic by growing your own

It’s not the best time of the year to start doing this, but there is still time to plant winter and spring crops like cabbages, broad beans, garlic, lettuce, rocket, spinach and potatoes.  When you grow your own, you can afford to stay organic.  For the price of some compost and a few seeds, you can have fresh, local, season produce all year round.  And you don’t even have to pay for the compost if you make your own.

Photo credit: René Ehrhardt

Go green in the kitchen with this green kitchen starter kit from Ethical Superstore (£50.00).

The kit includes:

An Eco Kettle: The UK’s best selling green gadget, even Prince Charles has one!  The Eco Kettle allows you to boil just the amount of water you need without repeated trips to the tap.  The central reservoir holds up to 8 cups of water, and you release into the boiling chamber just the amount of water you want to boil, a minimum of one cup.

An Ecozone Foot Operated Can Crusher:  Crush aluminium and steel cans without breaking a sweat with the Ecozone can crusher.  Saves lots of space in the recycling.

5 Litre Kitchen Caddy: Collect organic waste from the kitchen for composting.  Composting is a great way to reduce the amount of waste that you produce.

Compost-A-Bag Bin Liners (x25): To line your kitchen caddy, these bags will biodegrade once in your composter. No mess composting. No nasty compost buckets to wash.

I’ve written about composting with worms on this blog before and I pointed out a wormery that while perfect as far as function goes, isn’t something that you’ll want to show-off as a style statement. But never fear, because here is the wormery that you’ve been waiting for. Never before have I seen a wormery with such style, such elegance. Now you won’t have to hide it round the side of the house, out of site. You can make a feature of it, grow your herbs in it, perhaps some pretty flowers, or salad leaves. And all the while it will be working away, efficiently turning your kitchen and garden waste into compost and liquid feed for your plants.

It’s made from 100% recycled plastic, can be used inside or out and it doesn’t take up much space at all.

How does it work?

The bottom layer of the wormery is an urn with a tap, which collects and drains off the liquid plant feed. The next level up is the first layer for food scraps; when you’ve filled it, add the next composter and so on. Once the first composter is full simply start adding waste to the second composter and the worms will work their way up through the holes in the bottom to where the food is! By the time the second composter is full most of the worms will have left the first composter leaving it full of worm casts which are the richest natural fertiliser. Empty the first composter, use the contents on your garden, and then use it to put on top of the second composter tray once that fills up. The top level of the wormery is a planting tub, designed to make your wormery an attractive feature of your garden.

21. Say no to ATM receipts and save trees.

22. Set your PC’s energy settings to hibernate when you’re not using it. Here are instructions on how to make best use of your PC’s built in power saving features.

23. Join your local library and read to your heart’s content without having to buy new books. Think of all the trees you’ll save.

24. Reuse packaging materials like padded envelopes, bubble wrap and packing peanuts to keep them out of landfill and to save you buying them new.

25. Choose the electric hand dryer over paper towels to save energy. Seriously, it takes less energy to dry your hands with the electric dryer that it takes to produce the paper towel, and there’s less mess left to dispose of afterwards.

26. Turn your cars engine off when stuck in traffic. It uses less fuel to start the car than to idle for more than 30 seconds.

27. Instead of sending out paper invitations to your party, make your life a whole lot easier and save resources by using a free online service like pingg or mypunchbowl.

28. Volunteer. Get involved with the BTCV or other volunteering organisation to make new friends, get some exercise and do some good.

29. Save loads of money and energy by breastfeeding (or encouraging your partner to breastfeed) your babies.

30. Compost your fruit and vegetable peelings to make free compost for your garden.

Although I grew up very aware of environmental issues such as pollution and conservation, it wasn’t until I was in my early twenties that I really started to take action and do my bit to help protect the environment. Some of the very first things I did (this was in the days before low energy light bulbs and energy saving devices) was to compost, recycle and buy eco-friendly cleaning and personal products.

My first foray into composting involved a free composter from my local authority and a bucket on the kitchen floor next to the bin to collect the vegetable peelings. It wasn’t a bad system at all, but I can be a bit squeamish about cleaning out the bottom of a bucket after a weeks worth of vegetable peelings have been left to fester in it. It wasn’t until years later when I discovered the good old kitchen caddy with compostable bags that composting really became a pleasure for me.

These days composting is mess free (until it’s cooked and I sieve it and use it in my garden, but that’s the sort of mess that I thoroughly enjoy). Thank you compost caddy, you’re a good friend.