Reduce Your Waste

No one likes to waste money. We shop around for the best deals, wait until Briscoes is having a sale and go crazy for two-for-one bargains.

So isn’t it surprising that we aren’t more careful with our food? After all, every time we throw away uneaten food, we are wasting the money we spent on it.

If we think of our food in terms of how much it costs us to buy it, we may not be so quick to throw it out.

Even if you don’t think you are a big food waster, you may be surprised by how much you actually do waste and what you could save.

• If you threw out the bread ends of every loaf of bread that you bought in a year that would cost you about $27 a year. Solution: Save your money by eating the crusts or use them in recipes.
  
• Say you spent $10 at the supermarket to make the family favourite spaghetti bolognese for dinner, but you make too much. If the leftovers never get eaten, that’s about $3.33 gone to waste. Now that doesn’t sound like much, but if that situation happens twice a month, that’s $80 every year. Solution: Take your leftovers for lunch the next day or freeze them.
  
• Do you pick up a bunch of bananas every time that you’re at the supermarket but find at least one goes brown before you get to it? If you throw away the brown bananas that could cost you $30 a year. Solution: Store your bananas away from other fruit to stop them ripening so fast, and once they are too ripe, freeze them and use them for smoothies or baking.
  
• Even the humble vege could be costing you money. If you pay $2.29 for a head of broccoli but only cook the florets, and throw away the stalk, that’s up to $60 a year. Solution: Use your broccoli stalks in one of these recipes.

You may not think much of a couple of dollars here and there, but it all adds up. In this case it’s $200 a year being wasted on these items alone. Surely there are better ways to spend your money than throwing it in the bin?