Sustainable Kitchen Swaps

I wrote a post ages ago about the sustainable bathroom swaps I'd made and about how I was making my way through the house room by room in order to do a kind of 'sustainability audit' to try and slowly swap things out to hopefully make some lasting changes. I thought it was about time I did a kitchen version of that post and although there are heaps of things I could mention here like reusable coffee cups/water bottles/cutlery, buying things that come in glass or card over plastic, I thought I'd leave out the obvious and focus on some more recent changes I've made.

Cleaning products // These aren't exactly exclusive to the kitchen because we use them everywhere, but I class them as kitchen products mainly because they're stored in the kitchen and probably used in here most often. We invested in the Smol refillable sprays around a year ago and they're great; you receive three refillable bottles then the sprays themselves come in tablet form (saving a lot on transport and postal emissions) and you mix them yourself with water in the bottle, then simple reorder the tablets when you've run out. You get multi-purpose cleaner, bathroom cleaner and glass cleaner. 

Homemade wipes // Again, these aren't exclusive to the kitchen, but same as above really! I had some old t-shirts that weren't really good enough quality to take to the charity shop so I cut them up and made some reusable wipes with them instead. Instead of fully sewing them up I actually left a hole in one side so they're like cleaning mitts, which actually makes wiping stuff down way easier!

Reusable fruit and veg bags // What's really great is that a lot of supermarkets seem to already be using paper bags for their fresh fruit and veg, but we picked up some reusable fabric ones for super cheap so we just pop those in with our shopping bags and try and buy as much of our fruit and veg loose as possible.

Learning where to actually store food // I recently saw an article pop up saying that a lot of food waste is down to people not actually knowing where they should be storing it to make it last. It made me realise that I've never really read the packets of things to check whether I'm storing them in the right place and turns out, with some things, I wasn't. Mistakes rectified! 

Growing my own // I haven't exactly become a vegetable patch goddess overnight (what a title though eh), but I've been trialling growing my own tomatoes this summer and *shock horror* I actually grew some! It was surprisingly easy apart from the watering every single day thing (which isn't exactly difficult, it's just something to remember to do) so I'm seeing this year as the beginning of growing my own; next year I'm going to get more tomato plants (one doesn't really cut it) and look into what else I can grow too!