Step Thirteen: Set Up Your Pantry

Procrastinating Writers Note: I know blog posts are more fun with pictures, so expect some to be posted in the next few days or so. In the meantime, I'll be charging my camera. Sorry.

The last time I helped my grandma clean out her pantry, we found a canned chicken from 1976. My sisters and I treated that chicken as an honored family member, and, after setting a place for it at the dinner table for a week, we put it in the back of the pantry for our own children to one day find. Needless to say, my grandmother does not have a well-organized pantry. Buckle up though, because after some intensive reading, you're about to.

I promise, organizing your pantry will have great benefits (zero waste and otherwise). First of all, you'll be able to see what you have so you can use it up before it goes bad (something in there already turned? No problem, just compost it). Second, you'll know what foods your family consumes most and least, which will allow you to prioritize your bulk-food hunt. Lastly, having an uncluttered pantry will give you peace of mind and allow you to prepare meals quickly and easily, a boon to any household, not just a zero-waste one.

Let's dive right in by taking everything out of your pantry. Anything that isn't nailed or glued down should come out. If you're lucky, it will all fit on your counter and/or table space, if not, get creative with chairs and other furniture. Now that you have an empty pantry, take some time to clean it out. Scrub away any spills or sticky spots, wipe the dust off of everything, and sweep out the floor or the bottom of the space.

Now take a look at all the things you've taken out of the pantry. Odd items (old grocery bags, cans of WD-40, and stray toys) should be put away in a designated home that makes sense to you. If you like having spare light bulbs in your pantry, leave them ready to go back there, but if those items could be more sensibly stored elsewhere, find them a spot now. Next, look through all the food items. Anything that's gone stale, sour, mushy, or is past its expiration date should be composted, and its packaging recycled. Remember, food has a lot of nitrogen in it, so balance out your compost heap by adding some newspaper for its carbon content if you find you have a lot of stuff from your pantry to dump.

This next part is the step I find most fun, though I understand some people don't quite get the high out of categorizing and ordering that I experience. Again, the idea is to make a system that works for you. Try to put food back in a pattern that makes it simple for you to access and restock your pantry. Some people put like with like (all the spices on one shelf, all the cans on another), and others organize by meal (macaroni and cheese boxes next to the canned peas, noodles by jars of Alfredo sauce). A lot of houses and apartments don't have a pantry, so you may be organizing your food by cupboard, or you may want to put kid-friendly snacks and cereals on a lower shelf for the little ones, while foods that need more preparation find their place on the higher levels. Take some time to figure out what makes the best sense for you and your family, I promise the extra thought now will be worth it later.

At this stage don't worry about what food packaging you're putting back onto your shelves. It's better to eat through what you have than get rid of everything and start with a new and unfamiliar system. We'll address the zero waste transformation of your food later.

Once you've gone through this process with  your main pantry, continue through the rest of the food-centered locations of your kitchen. Turn out food storage cabinets, empty out all cupboards, clear off all shelves, and brave the depths of your refrigerator and freezer. Clean the space thoroughly, toss rotten food, and return the rest of your goods in the system you've decided on. Now pat yourself on the back for all your hard work, and take a moment to admire your beautiful new kitchen (sneak yourself a treat while you're at it; what's the good of knowing where the cookies are if you don't eat one?).

Stay tuned for part Thirteen and a Half: Evaluating your Food. This post was getting long, and this really deserves a step all its own. In the meantime, enjoy your lovely, easy-to-use food system.

First time reading about a hundred steps to zero waste? Go here for the introduction and index.

Cradle to Cradle: Waste Equals Food

Hello Dear Readers, today I wanted to introduce the concept of biological nutrients versus technological nutrients, but I've already written about this in a post on my composting blog, so I thought I'd just reprint that article here. Enjoy.

Not to burden you with too many book reviews in a row, but I just read Cradle to Cradle, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, and found one concept in their book particularly interesting. The book primarily addresses how products, buildings, and systems can be designed to be beneficial for the earth, the population, and the economy, rather than harmful or just "less bad". It doesn't deal much with composting, but their concept of technical vs. biological nutrients is incredibly relevant.

Ideally, in the human world we would treat our resources like the natural world, where everything cycles through different systems; the waste of one system is food for another. This isn't the case, even when one considers the growing recycling industry, but we could easily make it so by viewing all materials as either technical or biological nutrients. Biological nutrients are things that are compostable and can be fed back into the natural world as a nutritious, safe resource for plants and animals. Technical nutrients are things that can be fed back into the industrial system endlessly to be reused to make new products.

Currently our recycling system is flawed, as much of what we recycle is actually "down-cycled" into products of lesser quality. I definitely need to do more research on this subject, but basically the adding of dyes, paints, or solvents to a material contaminates it when it comes to future use. So if you have a green soda bottle, that plastic is still recyclable, but only as a different, usually lower-quality product.

There are exceptions to this, but system-wide we don't have a good method for recycling materials into products of equal quality and value. Even materials which should be easy to recycle, like metal, are often contaminated because of current recycling methods. For example, aluminum soda cans are often lined in plastic, and cars are crushed into a large block of material, rather than being disassembled to retrieve their copper, steel, and other resources.

I have a whole rant building on how we need to recycle better, design products and packaging with their reuse and recycling in mind, and how the plastics industry is particularly troublesome, but that's an article that needs a lot more thought, research, and calmer state of mind. So what I want to talk about is biological nutrients, and how important it is to separate them out from (what should be) technical nutrients.

As it stands now, unless you participate in some sort of recycling program, technical nutrients and biological nutrients are mixed together in your trash, then buried in the ground at a landfill where they are sealed off from soil and air. What this means is that even the biodegradable waste like banana peels and newspapers won't break down because the right aerobic (or air-loving) bacteria won't grow in this environment, and so there's nothing to facilitate the rotting, or composting, process. I wish every city had a composting program and was vigilant about separating out its waste, but this just isn't the case.

If the city won't do it, it's up to the citizens to make it happen. By all means write letters to your mayor, attend city council meetings, and make phone calls to your city's waste management department, but in the mean time, take matters into your own hands and start composting. Put everything you can into your home compost bin. If you know of neighbors or apartment dwellers who are unable to compost, offer your bin to them as well, it will only enrich your compost and make for a more beautiful world.

I think the idea of technical and biological nutrients is brilliant, and I intend to explore it further. But in the mean time, I know exactly what to do with all my biological nutrients to make sure they are returned safely and responsibly to the earth.

Step Two to Zero Waste

2.Set up a Compost Bin

As I’ve firmly stated many times before, I truly believe that composting will save the world. If everybody composted, either in their backyard or through a municipal program, we could cut our waste by at least a third, and possibly by one half. Composting is the ultimate form of recycling, as it takes your waste and turns it into rich food for the earth through an all-natural process that has no harmful effects or toxic by-products. I understand that composting can seem time-consuming and difficult at first, but as long as you have a diverse, well-aerated pile, you’ll have no trouble at all. I run a whole separate blog about composting, so I recommend that interested readers go there to explore the world of composting, but if you want the nutshell version, here it is:

To compost you just need a pile of organic material, but it’s easiest to put this in some sort of bin or container. Examples of compost bins are in the resources section at the end of the article. Once you have a bin set up, either indoors or outdoors, contribute all biological material to it. This includes kitchen scraps, hair and nail trimmings, yard waste like grass clippings and leaves, the contents of your vacuum cleaner, pizza boxes, and any wool or cotton cloth that’s been worn out.

Never layer more than six inches of one kind of material into the bin, otherwise the bacteria that break everything down won’t have a diverse enough food source and the pile will start to stink. Properly done, compost never smells of anything more than the forest floor. Shovel the pile around once a month so that the stuff on the top is now on the bottom and vice versa. This ensures that the bacteria have plenty of air. Without it, aerobic (air-loving) bacteria move out and anaerobic (non-air-loving) bacteria move in. This is bad, because anaerobic bacteria are the ones that stink.

After six to eight months, you should be seeing a rich, dark material that looks like the mulch or compost you see in all those Better Homes and Gardens pictures. This is finished compost, and is the best thing your garden or yard could ever get. Spread it around in your vegetable beds, flower gardens, and even in a thin layer over your lawn. You can fork it in if you like, but the worms in the soil will go mad for it and dig it in for you if you’re willing to wait a week or so.

Compost returns important nutrients to the soil, helps keep moisture locked in, and encourages all sorts of good bacteria, fungi, worms, and insects to move into your soil and start working for your benefit. After composting for years, I can’t imagine doing anything else with my biological waste, and wouldn’t want to.

Resources:

Compost Bin Examples

Homemade Compost Bin Guide

Indoor Composting (more information on this at Composting World)

Kitchen Compost Collection Pail (if you don't want to just use an old bucket or bowl)

Composting Guide (just one article, but goes over composting more in-depth)

What to Compost List

First time reading about a hundred steps to zero waste? Go here for the introduction and index.