Baby Steps to a Green World - Part 5

The glass jars that come with mayonnaise, pickles, and jelly will last long past their original contents. Remove paper lid liners, run the jars through the dishwasher, and you have another green resource. Jars stand tall and take up less shelf space in the fridge than bowls of the same capacity. Not all plastic jars survive the dishwasher, but it's worth a try. Ya can't save 'em all...unless you hand wash them and use them for non-food storage.

Some foods like oats and prunes come in cardboard cans with plastic lids. The oat canister has some possibilities for reuse but its plastic lid can be a real treasure. It may fit your cereal bowls or measuring cups which qualifies those for keepers in the fridge. If you can save leftover soup in a covered bowl, it's ready to pop into the microwave, with no extra storage container to wash.

Zipper type resealable plastic bags that contained brown sugar or hard cheese are easily cleaned to reuse. If that plastic mesh bag can hold eight pounds of oranges, it can certainly handle a pair of winter boots or a whole set of blocks.

Free broth

If you must peel veggies like potatoes and carrots, save those peels and trimmed off stems of broccoli and other vegetables to make vegetable broth. Wash these scraps first and put them in a plastic bag in the freezer. Keep adding peels and trimmings until the bag is full. Dump it into a pot, cover with water and simmer for a couple of hours. Cool and strain into glass jars for a great base for soup or stew. Refrigerate the broth and now you can toss those scraps knowing you have sucked every last bit of goodness out of them..

If you make your own chicken salad or chicken casseroles, you can parlay a couple of quarts of chicken broth into the bargain. Cover a whole chicken with water in a large pot. Add an onion and seasonings. Simmer covered until the meat is all but falling off the bones. Strain the chicken out, bone it, and fill some of those nice glass jars you've saved with the broth. Don't worry about removing the fat. Once the broth is fully chilled, the yellow fat will be easy to spoon off the top of the jar.

Free garbage containers

Once you've established the habit of saving the jars and plastic containers that come with purchased foods in them, it's hard to just throw out those that aren't worth saving. You know, the kind that can't take the heat of the dishwasher or are just too weird shaped.

Make 'em earn their place in the trash and cut down on bad smelling trash at the same time. Keep such jars handy near the sink or the trash to put all organic garbage in. Put the lid on and put the whole thing in the trash when it's full. Empty jar filled, smell contained, no need to buy fancy deodorizing garbage bags. Three points for the green team.

You do drain off and dispose of the fat from hamburger and bacon, don't you? It's too hot for a glass or plastic container, so keep an empty tin can handy. Another two points.

Here's a challenge:

Try not to throw anything away until you've used it twice. Extra points if you use it more than twice. Lose points if it's only been used once. Sure, some stuff - like the little sponge thingie in the bottom of a package of meat - must not be reused. No points either way. Likewise, the plastic wrap sealing the meat or a box of tea bags. But the styro tray the meat was in and the cardboard box...now those things have potential, even if it's nothing more than corraling little trash. Score one.