For the sake of green living, I thought I was doing pretty well in developing a green kitchen. Here are just a few things I’ve done to make my kitchen a healthier, more energy-efficient place to be:
- Got rid of all non-stick cookware (okay, I have two Teflon cake pans and two Teflons bread pans, but my husband had them before he married “The Crunchy Coach” and they are not used for baking, but for drumming by our son).
- Bought Energy-Star appliances when the older ones went kaput (refrigerator and dishwasher).
- Use old terry cloth towels to wipe up spills instead of paper towels.
- Use sunlight coming through kitchen window for growing plants.
- Bought a soapstone griddle to replace the Teflon frying pan.
- Used non-toxic paint to paint the kitchen.
- Use more glass storage containers.
- Never use the microwave for cooking (only for sterilizing sponges and such).
- Use biodegradable sponges for washing dishes and wiping counters, and add undiluted essential oils as disinfectants.
Of course, I know we could do better. When we replaced our kitchen countertop, I didn’t even think about looking into sustainable materials (I was pregnant and just at the end of a very nauseating first trimester, so please forgive me). Our refrigerator runs on electricity instead of propane or solar energy (but I keep it full, thus increasing its efficiency). And I regularly use stainless steel pans for cooking, which may leech some potentially dangerous metals, like nickel and molybdenum (say “molybdenum” ten times fast) into food.
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Okay, so I’m thinking that if we ever have a house built from the ground up, we’ll use concrete for the countertops and install solar panels onto the roof. We’ll have a system put in to collect all the gray water leaving the kitchen.
And then we will have arrived. We will have reached the pinnacle of green living – in the kitchen, anyway.
Or so I thought, until I found out about this. (So sorry, I wasn’t sure if I could legally copy and paste this photo into my blog, so click the link and come right back!)
“This”, ladies and gentlemen, is the Flow2 Kitchen. You wash your dishes by hand and hang them up on the vertical drying rack, which then drip water into the plant pots below. The refrigerator is cooled by evaporation, rather than electricity, and underneath the wooden cutting board is a worm composting bin.
Just when I thought I knew what a “green kitchen” should look like.
What do you think – green living at its best, or too simple for your lifestyle?