The concept of Zones in permaculture design was developed to allow areas of similar use, activities and frequency of visitation to be grouped together. The most used place of all is the home, designated as zone zero. This series of articles looks at how we have been setting up each room in the house to function more sustainably starting with the kitchen.
Why the kitchen?
- The kitchen is a high energy use area (cooking, fridge & freezer, hot water, heating & cooling etc.)
- Up to 18% of water is consumed/turned into grey or black water in the kitchen
- Almost all the material we compost comes from the kitchen
- Much of the material we recycle comes from the kitchen
- The kitchen is the heart of the home.
But what does the term ‘sustainable kitchen’ mean? To me it is a kitchen that encourages an environmentally friendly lifestyle by -
- Making it easy to compost
- Making it easy to recycle
- Having space for bulk food containers
- Being equipped with energy saving appliances and lighting
- Being set up to save water
- Being productive in and of itself and,
- Inviting you to cook!
If you are starting from scratch you can design and build your own version of the perfect (sustainable) kitchen, but we (like the majority of people) have to make the best of what we already have and optimise it by retrofitting. That will be the focus of this article.
So let’s look at each of the aspects which are set out above –
1. Making it easy to compost
This is essentially providing a container where organic materials can be stockpiled before being taken out to the composter/worm farm/chooks or wherever without chasing you out of the house due to the smell. The issue is how big the container needs to be and that will be governed by how much organic waste the kitchen produces and how often you want to head for the composter! One of the side effects we found when we started eating more out of the back yard was that the amount of rubbish we produced decreased considerably, but the amount of compostables we produced increased considerably.
There are a number of ways we have done this over the years, the most low tech one being the old 2 or 4 litre plastic ice cream container with lid, and we have used that approach on and off. We have also tried purpose built bins of varying sizes and materials. Recently we have come across what I believe to be THE answer, or at least the answer for us – a Bain Marie tray with a lid. I got the idea by accident, we had bought several to use making biochar but I had one too many and it was a bit small, so I pressed it into service as a compost container and it has turned out to be perfect, for a number of reasons –
- They are readily available from catering suppliers, ridiculously cheaply for what they are (the one I am using cost us about $20) and available in a multitude of sizes.
- They are made from stainless steel so they are easy to clean, easy to disinfect and they last forever! (unlike any of the plastic containers we have used)
- The rounded sides mean that there are no edges or seams to accumulate yuck and cause rust like happens with the more conventional cylindrical mild steel bins.
- Being rectangular they make it easy to scrape vegetable matter directly off the cutting board into it.
- They would also be available second hand from restaurants/eateries closing down.
It would also be possible to set one up in a drawer (assuming you have a spare drawer) if you got the right size. The only downside so far has been the dish in the lid so you can get your hand under the handle to lift it up, which takes a bit of space from inside the container, but all up it has been a winner for us so far!
2. Making it easy to recycle
The way we have found works best for us is pretty simple. Years ago I put up some hooks to hold hats and brooms and stuff near the kitchen/laundry doorway and we have a capacious (AKA big) bag hanging on the hook closest to the kitchen door. All recycling gets cleaned out (if appropriate) and then tossed into this bag. Approximately once a week we drag the recycling bin over near the front door, drag the recycling bag onto the front landing, then toss from one to the other, making sure that any recycling with our names and/or addresses has been removed as a precaution against identity theft.
Bingo! Works for us.
3. Having space for bulk food containers
One aspect of trying to live more sustainably is to reduce the amount of packaging we bring home and then have to either dispose of or recycle. One way we did this was to look at the sorts of foodstuffs we were buying and then identify and pursue packaging free alternatives. Buying in bulk can not only reduce food packaging we dispose of but can also save us money and increase our resilience, so it is a winner on all fronts. But we do have to be able to manage the supplies so we don’t inadvertently run out, or have them become unusable due to age or infestation.
We have been working over time to reduce the packaging we throw away by buying in bulk, buying packaging free, and growing/producing our own. For the big stuff that we go through quickly or has a long shelf life such as whole wheat, bakers flour, powdered milk, rolled oats, white rice etc have 20 litre polypropylene buckets with an airtight lid. These are generally stored in the laundry or the garage or a shed. For the day-to-day usage of the bulk stuff, we have large glass jars in the kitchen cupboards. We also have various sizes of glass jars from large ones we keep a good supply of things like red kidney or black beans, going on down though medium jars for things like nutritional yeast, dried onion and dried garlic to small jars for homemade curry and spice mixes, Italian herb mix and mixed herbs.
Some of the jars are recycled, particularly ones 500grams or less, but the larger ones (up to 3 kilos capacity) had to be bought in specifically, but they should be in use for a long time, seeing me out at least! We store them in and on various cupboards around the kitchen and dining room and I must admit I like seeing them there, for me they give the place a homey feel. But, it is a journey not a destination and we will continue to investigate sustainable food storage options into the future.
In terms of cleaning products we try to use materials like bicarb and vinegar, bought in bulk, for cleaning purposes with one glaring exception. Years ago we tried using a soap saver for washing the cutlery, plates and glasses etc. but found that the soap had a nasty habit of making the things we were washing up very slippery, and after we lost a couple of plates through being smashed on the floor, we went back to dish washing liquid. We do buy a 25 litre drum from a local supplier and refill squeeze bottles we have under the sink, which cuts down on cost and packaging considerably.
4. Being equipped with energy saving appliances and lighting
Generally speaking the appliances in our kitchen are designed to cook or to cool.
We have the usual stuff for cooking, a microwave and a gas range, but cooking for us can happen in a number of rooms of the house, or even out in zone 1.
Generally the way we work our cooking is that in summer we use our solar power system to power an induction hotplate and in winter we use the cooktop or oven in our wood heater to cook. If it works out that neither of those will do the job, the gas stove gets pushed into service, especially if it is late or I’m tired. Otherwise we do have other low/no energy appliances to help us cook including a couple of rocket stoves, a solar oven and a stored heat cooker (ie haybox cooker). The microwave is usually pressed into service to thaw or reheat previously cooked food again, using power from the solar panel/battery system. Also with the advent of our solar electricity system, appliances we got rid of years ago, have come back into use, particularly the slow cooker (crockpot) and rice cooker are very versatile and see frequent use in our place.
All in all the systems we have in place give us flexibility in how we cook to make the most of the energy source available at the time. This also increases our resilience, because if one system is offline, we can substitute it with another.
In terms of cooling, I would love a cool cupboard where cool air is pulled up from underneath the house, through a series of screened or perforated shelves and expelled through a solar chimney on the roof. Unfortunately we are not there yet. Prior to our present solar electric system, we had a 12 volt fridge which operated from the previous solar system (one half the system ran the lights, the other half ran the fridge). The fridge was a commercial fridge modified with a 12 volt danfoss compressor by a friend of mine. Our current fridge is an efficient, but conventional fridge (no freezer section), backed up by a chest freezer in the laundry.
The lighting has evolved over the years as our solar electric system has evolved. Starting out with a conventional caravan style festoon light which was very inefficient and really only provided enough light to move around, great for power outages but no so much for everyday use. This was superseded by caravan (el cheapo) fluorescent lights which provided more light but tended to burn out the poor quality tubes quickly. They were in turn superseded by (expensive) high efficiency fluorescent lighting which were great for everyday use, but still expensive, through to the LEDs we use today. All our lighting is still 12 volt, but fed by the new system direct from the 24 volt batteries through a 24v to 12v converter. We have an LED downlight over the stove and one over the sink, with two more over the dining room table next to the kitchen, to provide extra light on that side if required.
5. Being set up to save water
The water used in the kitchen is mainly from the kitchen sink, although we do have a dishwasher it is in the laundry. With there being only the two of us, it takes time to make up a load for the dishwasher, but it is much more water efficient to do that rather than do a series of small hand washes every day. The dishwasher (a Bosch) uses about 10 litres per load on our usual setting, which equates to 3 – 4 hand washes whereas each hand washed load we do would probably consume 15 litres by itself. The extra energy consumed is not an issue due to the solar energy/battery system providing the electricity for free.
To make the best use of water coming out of the kitchen tap we capture it for applying to the garden outside and to accomplish this we have gone super low tech, ie we use a bucket. The bucket sits in the sink and any water used for rinsing dishes, when peeling veg or waiting for the hot water to show up etc goes into the bucket and is then transferred to the garden. It is an el cheapo rectangular mop bucket but does a wonderful job.
When we first started out on this part of the journey I got hold of a sort of sink-within-a-sink that sat inside our kitchen sink and could be filled up, then removed to transfer the water for use elsewhere. Unfortunately it had a couple of shortcomings – it had a plughole/plug in the bottom, which leaked, and because it was so wide but shallow, when you lifted it out of the sink with more than a bit of water inside it became quite unstable and had a tendency to slosh the water out everywhere while it was being transported outside. This resulted in water all over the floor, the carpet, the cat, me…. You get the picture. So for a quarter the cost we picked up the bucket, and haven’t looked back.
6. Being productive in and of itself
The kitchen is where we cook up our food but that doesn’t mean it can’t be productive in its own right. Our kitchen faces west, but is covered by the back deck, which provides lots of shade, so we don’t get a lot of direct sunlight to grow even herbs on the windowsill. What we do use the kitchen space for is growing sprouts, particularly mung bean sprouts in a lunchbox, which needs no direct light. We also use the windowsill to green up soil sprouts which don’t require direct sunlight either.
7. Inviting you to cook
This one is a bit more difficult because it depends so much on personal preference, but obviously two metres of kitchen bench space and a microwave is not exactly inviting to cook up that seven course banquet! Our kitchen is not big at 2.7m x 2.9m, which is why the dishwasher and freezer reside in the laundry. In that kitchen we have 2 square metres of bench space, about 0.6 square metres of sink/drainage (plus associated under storage), a fridge and a stove, plus one half size and one full size pantry style cupboards . Needless to say there is not much room for 2 people to cook but it is quite well put together for one person and I find that it is, for me, a very inviting space to cook in.
The advantages of the smaller kitchen are that it is not big enough to contain much extraneous rubbish, and everything is near to hand. There is a world of kitchen gadgets out there but we confine our purchases to multipurpose kitchen gear, it is surprising how many of those kitchen gadgets they advertise are easily replaced with a sharp knife! It is also much quicker and easier to clean.
Other parts of our Zone 0 -
