11 Jul How can I live a greener life?
Living a greener life is a noble and important goal. Making environmentally conscious choices can help reduce your carbon footprint, conserve resources, and contribute to a more sustainable future. Here are some practical tips to help you live a greener life:
Buy half your food locally
The shorter the food chain, the less waste created before it reaches your kitchen. Try buying 50% of food grown within 40 km of where you live. It’s an achievable figure, especially when producers are reviving homegrown pulses including lentils, quinoa, carlin peas and fava beans. The nutritional value of fruit and veg lasts for only a short time, so how far your food has travelled matters.
Compost on the go
Compost isn’t just for the garden – think about reducing your food waste when you’re on the go. A reusable coffee cup makes a great impromptu container for your lunch scraps – take apple cores or bread crusts home to compost.
Plan ahead
Make the most of seasonal gluts and preserve vegetables in oils, vinegars, ketchup and marinades, or freeze them. Blitz and freeze tomatoes in containers for passata all year round, make kimchi from cauliflower stalks and leaves; use beetroot in jams, vinegars and oil, then chop stalks and leaves to top pastas, pizzas and curry.
Minimise packaging
Look for loose fruit and vegetables, and take your own containers to shops and markets. If you are buying packaged food, look at where the product comes from and try to choose the more local option. The most recyclable plastics are PET, found in drinks bottles and fruit punnets, and HDPE, in milk bottles and cereal box liners; so if you can’t avoid it, go for these, then reuse or recycle what you can.
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