3 helpful ideas to create a zero waste kitchen

Most of us have a food waste bin alongside our recycling in the kitchen, often hidden away somewhere out of sight and where smells won't reach the rest of the room. But imagine if you could eliminate the unsightly, smelly presence of a food bin altogether.

By making a monthly food shopping plan, you can ensure you only buy and cook the food that you need to keep everyone in the house happy. Apps like Mealime and Meal Planner Pal are useful tools that help you map out exactly what you're going to be up to in your waste-free kitchen, so that you can tailor your shopping to fit your needs and keep an eye on your diet at the same time.

Once you've got a food shopping plan in place, invest in some containers you can use to store food in your freezer. That way, if you do happen to cook a bit too much, or if you have some food left over, you can quickly pop it into your containers and freeze it for another day instead of throwing it away.

A composter is another brilliant investment for eco-friendly living, to help you keep food out of the bin and turn it into food for your garden. You can buy compost bins cheaply and keep them in your yard or garden, so that the smell of your old teabags, coffee grounds, peelings, stale bread and other food scraps don't linger in your kitchen. If you're a keen gardener, you can even buy a heated composter to create useful mulch for your soil even quicker.

The way we consume water and other drinks can be a significant contributing factor to kitchen waste, and there are some easy ways to cut down on the amount of plastic that ends up in your bin.

If you prefer to drink bottled water rather than getting it from your kitchen tap, consider buying a water filter. There is a wide range of water filtering products available at affordable prices, and you can pick up a durable, long-lasting, stylish drinks carrier so that you never need to buy bottled water again.

For hot drinks, you can find an impressive range of fashionable containers that you can carry with you when you're out and about, negating the need to bring home disposable coffee and tea containers that would otherwise fill up your kitchen bin.

Shops and supermarkets are also selling zero-waste swaps like metal and paper straws to help consumers ditch yet another pesky single-use plastic – the drinks straw.

Buying in bulk is another great way to reduce waste, by avoiding the huge amounts of packaging that contain each portion of food that we buy.

Most towns and cities now have zero-waste food stores where you can take your own containers and fill them with dry products like pasta, cereal, grains, seeds, nuts, flour, rice, coffee, tea and dried fruit. This cancels out all of the waste material normally associated with food shopping!

If you've got a pantry at home, you can stock it with attractively labelled tubs for each of your zero-waste products, keeping your kitchen organised, stylish, and waste free!