Kat Neeser in her kitchen

We have all been told about eating local, organic, fairtrade food and, thanks to Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall, no one wants a battery-farmed chicken any more - but greening your food life does not begin and end with what lands on your plate.

Your kitchen produces more waste than any other room in the house but using energy-efficient cooking techniques and avoiding toxic cleaning materials all contribute to reducing the eco footprint of your kitchen.

Kat Neeser, from community group Transition Brighton And Hove, has been eating and cooking eco-style for the past ten years. Thinking about the planet has become so ingrained for her, she says she couldn't live any other way. "Even if someone said, Oh, actually, there is no global warming and we can use as much fossil fuel and road transport as we like' - I still wouldn't go back. It's a question of ethics as much as anything else."

Each time you eat a carrot raw, rather than cooked, you help reduce your carbon footprint.

Passing up that bottled water flown in from the Alps for a glass of tap water can help you reduce the amount of packaging you dispose of in your kitchen and reduce your food and drink miles at the same time.

Kat says: "It is really nice to support your local economy rather than big international companies. And it's just common sense not to buy food sprayed with loads of chemical rubbish."

There are plenty of places around Brighton to source local food. Try some in-season vegetable boxes, delivered direct to your door. Or visit shops, such as Infinity Foods in North Road Brighton, which sell great organic food.

And, of course, there are excellent farmers' markets across the county.

Biodegradable waste from your kitchen - paper, food, fruit and vegetables - breaks down to produce methane gas when it goes to landfill. Sixtyeight per cent - or 384kg - of the amount sent to landfill by each household in a year is biodegradable, says Defra.

The agency is concerned that, without effort at the local level, the UK won't meet the EU 2020 target for reducing UK biodegradeable waste-to-landfill by 65 per cent on 1995 figures.

So recycling cereal boxes and composting banana peel could help you to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill each year - a staggering 12,000kg per household. Much of this can easily be recycled or composted, helping you reduce your contribution to global warming.

Brighton and Hove City Council, along with councils in West Sussex, is encouraging us to compost by subsidising backyard bins and kitchen caddies. So save those apple cores and put them in your backyard bin. Or stash them in a caddy and take them to a local kitchen-waste refuse site. Veolia Environmental Services, which runs landfill sites for the city, estimates it helps prevent 200,000 tonnes of green waste going to landfill each year.

But what about greener cooking?

Kat Neeser likes to prepare food from scratch. She says: "The last time I bought a ready meal was in 1996. It was a Findus Lean Cuisine. I couldn't do that now. You can't get locallyproduced processed food, for a start, and I couldn't throw the packaging away. I would have to grow a plant in it or something.

"It really pains me if I have to use the oven for just one thing. If I need to bake or roast something I have a scout around the kitchen and think what I can eat in the next day. I'll probably chop up some vegetables and roast them at the same time, maybe even bake some biscuits."

So dig out the recipe books and make a stew with those extra veggies you bought. When you're doing the Sunday roast, bake a cake. Don't let that flour go stale and end up in landfill.

2:10pm Monday 10th March 2008

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