Reusing, Recycling, and Juicing!

Squash from the garden & leftovers from the kids' lunches

When you have children you inevitably have lots of waste. They create extra laundry, don't finish their food, bring home lots of papers from school, and grow like weeds and make cloth and shoe shopping a regular chore.

I try to manage our waste, so in my house I was able to get our family of five down to two bags of garbage a week. I realized a lot of garbage was food, and so in an effort to not eat all of their left-overs I decided to compost. That has been working well, and our garbage went down to one bag a week. However, I prefer to get the most use out of a thing, like reusing before recycling. Especially when things are still in good or even great condition.

Recently we bought a juicer for our 11th wedding anniversary (steel). I thought it would be like many other kitchen items, cool but rarely used. I've made a good effort though and have been juicing every day. But one of the best parts about it is when my kids get home from school and I unpack their lunches. Any leftover fruit (pears, apples, pineapples, strawberries) and any leftover veggies (carrots, celery, green beans) gets put to the side to add to my juice.

As a backyard city gardener I especially appreciate the juicer (and blender) as you never want to see all that work and patience in the garden end up in the garbage or even compost. So when my kids don't finish their snack, whether it's strawberries or tomatoes, I don't panic, I just juice it.

Any parent knows that wasted food is like money down the drain. And any juicer knows that it takes a lot of food to make a glass of juice. This has turned out to be a win, win, win for me and my family. I've saved money, saved food, and produced less waste (there's always plenty of compost material already)...good for the pocket-book, digestive tract, and environment!

NOTE: this also works well for making smoothies in a blender if you don't have a juicer, minus the veggies. Toss the unused fruit into the freezer to keep it from decomposing if you aren't ready to blend right away.

Alexandra Gnoske is a nature lover, writer, and environmental expert.