Zero Waste Home: Tips Series 1

In an era where waste management is critical and seeks attention from all corners, here are few tips to make your home a free waste zone.
Before you start:

• Ensure yourself with a reusable water bottle, a couple grocery totes, a few cloth bags and reusable jars and bottles.
• Get your 5Rs right: 

1. Refuse what you do not need
2. Reduce what you do need
3. Reuse what you consume
4. Recycle what you cannot Refuse, Reduce or Reuse
5. Rot (Compost) the rest. 

Most of the waste at home is mainly comes from kitchen. To begin with the zero-waste home tips, here are few tips for a clean kitchen.

KITCHEN

1. Welcome alternatives to disposables.
2. Swap paper towels for reusable rags, swap sandwich baggies for kitchen towels or stainless containers, drop garbage liners all together.
3. Buy in bulk or at the counter, bring reusable bags, jars (wet items such as meat, deli, fish, cheese, oil, butter) and bottles (liquids: oil, soy sauce, shampoo, conditioner).
4. Shop the farmer's market: they'll take the egg carton and the berries baskets back for reuse. Your veggies will also most likely be free of plastic and stickers.
5. Use bulk liquid Castile soap as a dish/hand cleaner, baking soda as a scrubber with a compostable cleaning brush. Purchase dishwasher detergent in bulk.
6. Reinvent your leftovers before they go bad. Go thru your recipe binder/box and only keep the recipes that can be achieved with zero waste in mind.
7. Reuse single-side printed paper for grocery shopping and errands list, use your lettuce cleaning water to water plants. 

Tips courtesy: http://zerowastehome.blogspot.in/p/tips.html