Easy Tips for a Green Kitchen

Kitchens are often the busiest, most utilized room in the house. We cook, study, work, and entertain in our kitchens. We also produce a lot of waste and use a lot of energy in the kitchen, which makes it a great place to make a few eco friendly changes. It's not necessary to remodel or invest a lot of money into turning your kitchen green, when a few easy changes can make a big difference.

A good place to start is under the kitchen sink. Clean out all those old kitchen cleaners and substitute them for environmentally friendly products. Some people have been known to get headaches after they run the dishwasher. Dishwasher soap contains chlorine which can cause headaches and other side effects. Detergents also affect the environment once they swirl down your drain. It's easy to find eco friendly cleaning products on the store shelves these days, but you can also make your own! Baking soda and water makes a good scrub for your sink or to clean the oven, and vinegar and water is a g=favorite for cleaning glass and mirrors. Lemon essential oil can be used to clean tile floors and it smells great too.

The use of plastic grocery bags and garbage bags has become a real problem environmentally. Plastic bags can take 100 years to degrade, even though often they are used only once for a very short time. Of course we can always choose paper bags or bring a reusable bag to the store, but for a kitchen garbage bag, paper doesn't always work. There are trash bags made from cornstarch that can biodegrade in as little as 10 days. BioBags is a popular line available online. Their bags use no polyethylene or chemicals, and the cornstarch they use comes from GMO free corn. Replacing your plastic trash bags with paper or a product like BioBags is an easy and inexpensive change to make.

Many of us are recycling, but it can be made even easier to do if a small area is set aside for just that purpose. Set up different containers for different types of trash, and keep handy the information on what you can recycle and where you can drop off your items.

If you can afford to invest a little money, upgrading your appliances is still cheaper than a remodel. Your refrigerator uses the most energy in your kitchen, so changing to an energy efficient model can save you a bit of money in the long run. On any appliance, look for the Energy Star rating. This rating will give you a significant improvement on your energy bill. In as little as the past eight years, the energy efficiency in most appliances has improved almost 40%! Short of replacing your refrigerator, make sure the temperature is kept at about 38 degrees, and that enough space is left behind the unit to let air circulate properly. Don't place your refrigerator next to the oven or dishwasher, which produce heat to make your refrigerator work harder.

A tap water filter is a healthy green change you can make your family. Units are inexpensive and are easy to install. Tap water in many cities can contain as much as 140 different chemicals, many of which are unregulated. To buy the right tap water filter for your kitchen, it's important to get one that actually treats the contaminants in your area. Contact your local water department and get a copy of their water quality report. Buy a filter that is certified by the NSF (www.nsf.org) that will remove those contaminants, and remember to change the filter according to the manufacturer standards.

Remember that the few changes you make now in your kitchen can have a big difference on your energy bills, the environment and your health. It's easy to have a green kitchen, and it doesn't have to break the bank.