If you are looking for different ways to reduce waste, live more sustainably, and save some money, finding creative ways to use your kitchen scraps can be a great start. Think about it: how many times a week do you discard kitchen scraps? What if you knew some easy ways to reuse them?
Turn your leftovers into something useful, delicious, or even beautiful! After reading these 15 clever ways to give your kitchen waste a new purpose, you will be thinking twice before you throw away any scraps.
Make Homemade Stock From Vegetable Ends and Peels
Don’t discard vegetable scraps like onion skins, carrot peels, celery, or leek ends. These and other vegetable scraps can be a good base for a rich homemade broth. Don’t have enough? Simply freeze them using a ziplock bag and keep adding to the same bag every time you get some. Once the bag is full, it’s time to make that hearty stock.
Homemade stock is the perfect addition to your menu. You can prepare the classic noodle soup using your own broth, or add it to sauces and other dishes to make them tastier and more nutritious.
Get a Nutrient-rich Compost For Your Garden
If you own a compost bin, composting your organic kitchen waste is an efficient way to repurpose your kitchen scraps. You can make a nutrient-rich compost with vegetable peels, coffee grounds, eggshells, fruit scraps, etc.
Add them to your compost bin together with some dry leaves, green leaves, sticks, and other compost-friendly materials.
Regrow Vegetables
Using kitchen scraps, you can regrow vegetables in different ways. You can take the seeds from peppers, pumpkins, tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers, and other fruits to replant them. Also, you can place the root ends of green onions, lettuce, and celery in a shallow cup of water to regrow them in just a few days.
You may need to dry the seeds before replanting them, and if you want to regrow vegetables from the root ends, keep changing the water every second day.
Make Your Own Plant Fertilizer
You can make liquid or powder fertilizer with banana peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, and other kitchen scraps. Make a compost tea, or soak banana peels in water to make a liquid fertilizer. You can dry and grind banana peels and eggshells to turn them into powder that can be used as a natural fertilizer rich in potassium and calcium.
Using kitchen scraps this way is an excellent method to feed your garden with organic fertilizers.
Infuse Your Oils
Soak citrus peels, herb stems, and spicy pepper scraps in oil for a few weeks. You’ll be creating your own infused condiment for cooking and salads.
You can also infuse vinegar or water using this method. We like adding aromatic scraps to our water with some lemon juice.
Natural Dyes
Make your own dyes from kitchen scraps. Once you learn how to make them, you’ll never discard onion skins, avocado pits, or fruit peels again. You can get a beautiful pink dye from avocado skin and pits; did you know that?
You can use natural dyes for fabric and other homemade projects.
Cleaners and Deodorizers
Citrus peels and white vinegar make for a fantastic floor and surface cleaning product, leaving a fresh aroma. You only need some water, citrus peels, and a drizzle of cleaning vinegar to make this mix.
Use this natural cleaning product to clean your floors and surfaces, and you’ll avoid using chemical products to keep your house spotless!
Tea and Infusions
Use all those herbal stems, citrus and ginger peels, and apple skins to make soothing teas and infusions. You can also add your regular tea bag for extra flavor, but using kitchen scraps this way will give your evening tea a unique flavor.
Next time you peel an apple or use some ginger, keep those peels in a separate container to add to your next infusion.
Water your Indoor Plants
Don’t pour down the sink pasta water or aquarium water, as these can be used to water your plants. Pasta water contains starch, which introduces different nutrients to the water, and aquarium water is rich in many micro-nutrients that will make your plants look vibrant and healthy.
If you use pasta water make sure is not salted or contains any other seasonings or oil.
Make Sauces and Salad Dressings from Almost Empty Jars
Don’t toss those almost empty jars of mustard, peanut butter, or jam. By adding some other ingredients, you can make a delicious sauce for your next meal. For example, if you have some mustard left in a jar, add some olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and honey. Shake the jar until all the ingredients are combined, and enjoy this salad dressing with your favorite salad!
You can create your own sauce and dressing recipes with different jars. We like using the peanut butter jar to make creamy sauces for our satay skewers.
Use Cheese Rinds for Soups and Pasta
That cheese rind from Parmiggiano and other cheese is the best way to add umami to your pasta sauces and soups. Add the rind while cooking your next pasta sauce or making a homemade stock, and take it out before serving.
Enhance your dishes using something that you would most probably have thrown away!
Make Salads and Other Recipes With Vegetable Tops
Before you discard those green tops from your veggies, make sure you look for recipes. Nowadays, you can find a recipe for almost everything, and they can be a great find! Beetroots, carrots, turnips, radishes, or celery all come with green tops that we normally throw away, but what if you could give these greens a new purpose in your dishes?
Make the Most Of Your Stale Bread
Some recipes call for specifically stale bread, such as croutons, loaves, and some desserts. Don’t place your stale bread in the bin, it just doesn’t belong there! As long as your bread is not moldy, I’m sure you can find another way to use it.
Ground the bread to make breadcrumbs that you can freeze for later use, make some croutons using your air fryer or oven for your salads and soups, or find a recipe for bread pudding!
Natural Scrubbing Product
If you are a coffee lover and want radiant skin all year round, you need to use those coffee grounds as a natural body scrub. There are so many ingredients that you already have at home you can use to make your own scrubs, and coffee grounds is just one of them.
You can also use coffee grounds to scrub pots and pans to make them look like the first day.
Other Interesting Things To Do With Coffee Grounds
If you enjoy coffee, you will probably indulge in your taste more than once every day. Many people enjoy their coffee hot or cold, and some even like it in their desserts. This leads to a never-ending supply of used coffee heading to the waste each evening.
If, like most of the country, you don’t know what to do with this avalanche of coffee grounds, you’re in the right place! Before getting rid of them, you can use them for many things, and I’ve put together a list of the more interesting ways to consider before heading to the trash.
Fertilizer
Coffee grounds contain minerals. These are nutrients that help plants grow. Potassium, nitrogen, calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus are good for fertilizing the garden. Coffee grounds can also strip heavy metals from the soil.
Soil can be poor in nutrients. To help your plants take advantage of these minerals, use coffee grounds to fertilize your garden. Add it to the soil around your plants to also get useful worms.
Coffee grounds also make a great substrate. They have the perfect nutrients for mushrooms and have already been sterilized when you boil your coffee.
Composting
Composting preserves the minerals in coffee grounds until you need them. Compost coffee grounds during winter. Your plants are still seeds, then. They’ll need nutrients come spring. Coffee grounds will come in handy when the time is right.
Compost refers to combining kitchen waste. It includes fruit trimmings, organic waste, and paper. Coffee grounds make your compost better. They add nutrients that will benefit the soil.
Flea Remover
If you’re a pet owner, your buddy probably becomes infested with fleas often. Moreover, you may know that there are many chemicals you wouldn’t want around them in commercially available flea-removal products.
Like other insects, fleas hate coffee. After washing your pup, rub it with coffee grounds, rinse, and allow its fur to dry naturally. The coat will also look healthier and more glossy after the treatment.
Smell Neutralizer
Nitrogen is one of the minerals in coffee. When it combines with carbon, it becomes a smell neutralizer, absorbing and eliminating unpleasant odors. To prolong the time between a full fridge purge and cleaning, put a bowl of coffee grounds in the fridge.
Alternatively, use them as deodorizers in your gym bag. To use them as deodorizers, put them in an old sock. Then, add the sock to your gym bag. Grounds can also remove the smell of garlic or onion from your hands. Use them every time you chop these vegetables.
Eye Circle Treatment
Caffeine and antioxidants are great for the sensitive skin under our eyes. They can reduce the appearance of eye circles and nourish the skin.
For this treatment, combine the grounds with a good oil, like coconut or sweet almond oil. Delicately apply this paste to the under-eye are without rubbing. Let it sit for 10 minutes, then rinse. You can do this daily or as often as you need.
Hair Treatment
Exfoliating the scalp is as important as exfoliating your body. It removes shampoo and conditioner buildup and dead skin cells. Grab a handful of coffee grounds and gently massage them into the scalp before you wash your hair.
If you do this a couple of times a week, caffeine may also stimulate hair growth and make your tresses healthy and shiny—all this without any harsh chemicals!
Pot and Pan Cleaner
You made a great meal for dinner, but now comes the hard part. Your pot has some burned, caked-on residue on the bottom. What to do? Use the coffee grounds’ coarse texture to your advantage. You can scour the pot with them.
To clean the pot, add coffee grounds and use a kitchen sponge to scrub it. Rinse the pot thoroughly after you’re done. It will remove any leftover coffee grounds.
Coffee Dye
Have you ever spilled coffee on yourself? If you have, you know only red wine can leave a more difficult-to-remove stain. Why not take advantage of coffee’s natural dying properties?
You can use coffee grounds to dye paper, rayon, and even cotton. They can make your clothes look distressed or vintage and disguise existing stains. If you have naturally dark hair, you can also replace your chemical-laden hair dye with coffee grounds.
Fireplace Cleaner
Cleaning your fireplace is messy. Ashes form clouds as you try to remove them and often land on furniture, making your cleaning more difficult.
You can use coffee grounds to weigh down ashes. When you do, the clouds will not form as easily or travel to other parts of your house. You’ll appreciate the mess-free cleaning they provide.
Meat Tenderizer
Coffee contains acids and enzymes that can break down muscle fibers and protein, making meat soft. Coffee grounds and salt can tenderize the meat and enhance its flavor.
You can combine coffee grounds with your favorite dry rub and use it on the meat one to two hours before cooking it. When the grounds cook along with the meat, they form a crispy crust that adds a lovely texture to your meal.
Furniture Repair
I love wood furniture. It is durable and beautiful. However, it scratches easily. Instead of spending money on scratch-repair products, I like to use coffee grounds to remove the scratches.
Make a thick water coffee grounds paste and rub it into the scratches with a cotton ball or swab. After 15 minutes, wipe it off using a dry cloth. The furniture will become darker, disguising the scratch. Repeat the process until you reach the desired color.
Pest Repellent
Often, caffeine is the reason we drink coffee. We love it, but it is deadly to insects. Because of this, coffee grounds can be used as a bug repellent. If fruit flies and snails plague your garden, you can put down coffee grounds around your backyard or garden.
Additionally, keep it in bowls around areas where you like to sit outdoors. Most insects will give it a wide berth, and you’ll get some peace when you want to relax in your garden.
Mosquito Repellent
Mosquitos are also insects and vulnerable to coffee. To keep them away, you can use coffee grounds outdoors in areas where you like to sit, especially late at night. Dry the grounds and put them in a clay pot. If you don’t have one, you can use tin foil.
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