Restaurants and commercial kitchens throw away tons of food every year -- it's considered excess inventory, even though it could be given to food banks or hunger charities. One of the problems of getting the excess food to the charities is that often there isn't enough manpower to take the food to the shelter. Contact your local food bank or hunger charity and ask if it needs any volunteer "food runners." You literally donate time to pick up excess food (that's been properly packaged by the commercial kitchen) and bring it to the charity. It's one easy step to stop waste and alleviate hunger.

If you're having a party for a large group of people and you rent glassware, dishes and flatware from a rental company, it may seem rude to send them back dirty, but it isn't. The reality is, even if you do a thorough job in washing your rentals, the companies are required to use a commercial-grade dishwasher to fully clean and sanitize them before they go out to another party, so they are prepared to clean them anyway. Also, if you've got a sink full of dishes from a party, use the dishwasher: A loaded automatic dishwasher is much more water- and energy-efficient than washing by hand.

Do you have a backyard compost pile? In the spring, summer and fall months, composting kitchen scraps and yard waste is an ecological way to use naturally occurring microbes to break down organic matter into beneficial mulch. But in the winter months, these microbes either slow down or stop completely. To protect your compost in the cold months, you should protect it from the oversaturation of water that comes from snow and ice. By covering it with a tarp, the microbes will be protected from the elements and will still be active come spring. You can still add kitchen waste to the pile through the winter months just by lifting and replacing the tarp.