Keeping It Out of The Landfill
Honest note: no ads, no Amazon affiliate. Affiliate and referral links are always marked. Full disclosure.
Let me be honest with you up front, because you’ll see right through me otherwise: I am not a zero-waste person. We keep paper towels in the house (the folks who help us clean prefer them), I buy frost cloth on sale in plastic sleeves, and my kitchen is not a package-free utopia. What I do have is a handful of things I genuinely do, mostly because they save money or make the garden better and happen to be the right thing too. That’s the honest version, and it’s the only one I’m going to sell you.
Food scraps — Mill (a.k.a. Millicent)
The one gadget in this zone, and yes, I named her. Mill is a food recycler that turns scraps into dry, ground-up “grounds” overnight: no smell, no fruit flies, no gross bowl sitting on the counter. Mine is the full-size (roughly trash-can-sized) model, and she lives in the garage, right in the path I already walk, which turns out to be the whole trick; the friction of trekking out to the compost pile in the Georgia-winter dark was the actual problem. The grounds go into my compost pile on the weekend or straight into the garden soil. It’s a splurge (you can buy outright, or lease for $35/month like I do), but it closed the gap between what I care about and what I actually do, and for a household that cooks like we do, that’s real.
Where to buy: Mill — referral link (referral, fully disclosed: you get $150 off an outright purchase; I get $100 toward my lease payment. That’s the deal around here.)
As seen in: How I Became the Person Who Named My Food Recycler.
Composting — the homemade 2-bin system
Here’s where I’ll talk you out of buying something. Our property is big enough that a cute little compost tumbler is a joke; it fills up in a week and then what. So we built a two-bin system instead: a pair of roughly 4x4x3 boxes framed from leftover barn lumber and wrapped in chicken wire, one bin cooking while the other fills. Total cost, basically nothing, because it’s scrap wood and a roll of wire. It handles everything (Mill grounds, garden waste, the endless leaves) at a scale a store-bought bin never could, and it’s a genuinely satisfying weekend build. If you’ve got the room, don’t buy a bin. Build one.
No link, on purpose: this is scrap lumber and chicken wire from the hardware store. The point is that the best composter for a big yard is the one you build.
Water — the drip setup earns its keep
The most quietly sustainable thing I do isn’t a product, it’s a system: drip irrigation puts water at the roots instead of spraying it into the July air, and a smart timer means the beds get exactly what they need and nothing more. It saves real water and real money over a summer. The gear (Dripworks tubing and the Orbit B-hyve timers) lives over in the Garden, so I won’t list it twice.
The quietest one — buy it once, or buy it used
The least glamorous sustainability move I’ve got, and maybe the most effective: buy things that last, and buy them used when you can. The cast iron that will outlive me, the tools I can repair instead of replace, the camera gear I buy refurbished from KEH instead of new. Nothing gets kept out of a landfill more reliably than a thing you never have to throw away. It’s threaded through this whole page on purpose; the Lodge in the Everyday Kitchen and the used gear in Behind the Camera are as “green” as anything with a leaf on the label.
Food waste, delivered smarter — Misfits Market
Rounding it out: I lean on Misfits Market in the off-season for ugly-but-perfect produce and pantry goods built around cutting food waste. It lives in the Pantry with the rest of my delivery habits, but it belongs in this conversation too.