Ask Veronica: How can I be more environmentally efficient at home?

I’m always on the lookout for strategies to reduce our family’s environmental footprint—and the easier they are to work into our routines, the higher the likelihood that we’ll actually stick to the plan.

Jean Ponzi, green resources specialist at EarthWays Center of Missouri Botanical Garden, is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to the subject of sustainability. Here’s what she had to say about food waste, composting, reducing phantom power, air sealing the house and more. 

Food Waste 

Our expert is a fan of Too Good to Waste, an online program that helps households evaluate how they’re choosing, storing, and using food “so that you can get out of the habit of developing science experiments in the back of your refrigerator and freezer,” she says. To get the whole family excited about cutting down on waste, she suggests organizing a food waste challenge inspired by the Green Dining Alliance. “This is not an opportunity for self-flagellation,” says Ponzi. “It’s a way to learn and to modify habits.” In addition to  shopping your refrigerator and eating your leftovers, understanding the role of expiration dates on food is essential to helping families reduce food waste. “There’s no hard and fast guidance or regulation about what those dates mean for any product other than baby formula,” says Ponzi. Families should be aware of the dates, but they shouldn’t be perceived as being a hard and fast rule. “They’re bits of guidance that help reduce spoilage, so that you cycle things through your pantry, or cycle things through your cabinet or your refrigerator in a way that you use the older things first. But that is not an indicator that the food is bad, unless you’re all consuming baby formula,” she says. Trust your nose, always. “If your nose says this is funky or it doesn’t taste right, if it doesn’t smell right, then, okay, that stuff that can go into the compost, as long as it’s not meat or dairy.” 

Composting at Home

Whether you manage your own backyard compost pile or hire a local company to recycle your food scraps for you, composting keeps toxic chemicals out of landfills and recycles food into new and useful products.  “Composting is such second nature to me. I would be bereft without my compost bucket and my compost pile,” according to Ponzi. So what goes into a compost bin? Plant-based organic waste includes vegetable trimmings from your kitchen, bread, coffee grounds, loose leaf tea, and egg shells, but no dairy or meat because of the populations of decomposers that break it down (think maggots and scavengers). Community composters will let you know what they’re able to compost for you based on the system and the setup they have to decompose materials. Click here and here for more information about composting. 

Energy Efficient Spaces

“Energy use is a fact of life, but making that energy usage as efficient as possible is really, really important,” says Ponzi. Any device with a clock, a timer, or a cube-shaped plug is always using electricity—even when the device is turned off. This is what’s referred to as phantom power, which can make up 3 to 5 percent of a home’s energy usage, says Ponzi. “That may not seem like much, but if you look at your electric bill and figure out what that is, and multiply that times 12, then you’ll figure out what you’re paying for that phantom power consumption over the course of a typical year,” she says. To minimize phantom power, use power strips, including smart power strips that homeowners can monitor with a smart device controller. Create a charging station in a convenient place at home for your family’s devices. “Set them on a counter, set them on a shelf, plug them in, and when there’s no devices in there, switch off the strip,” says Ponzi. 

Air Sealing 

Find the leaks in your home (under doors, around windows, behind electrical outlets on exterior walls) and seal them. Doing so can reduce heating and cooling bills, as well as reduce the use of energy, which helps limit your climate impact. If you’re preparing to upgrade your heating and air conditioning system, or if you’re thinking about getting new windows, Ponzi recommends getting an energy audit beforehand to right size the investments for efficiency. Other options include buying inexpensive, DIY air sealing products at the local hardware store that run the gamut from weather stripping to plastic sheeting for windows. In addition, buy appliances with the Energy Star logo, install ceiling fans so that air conditioning and heating can be set at a higher threshold (remember to reverse the direction of fans during the winter months so that it’s circulating warm air down), and, lastly, dress for the weather. Wear your cool-weather clothes in hot months and wear your cold weather clothes in cold months. Says Ponzi: “Don’t just hit the thermostat.”