Student Guide to Sustainable Living
Authors, design & photos Alexandra Lamp Chantal Brugge Youri Haak Special thanks Maddy Vollebregt Anniek Kortleve Published by GreenTU Delft December 2020
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Welcome to our guide about sustainability! This is the second edition of a book series for students like you to guide you to a greener lifestyle. This practical guide introduces tips and tricks for affordable sustainability at home. These books are developed in collaboration with GreenTU. They are run by students with help from the university and aim to improve the sustainability of both the academic curriculum and operations at the university. Treat this book as a journal and have fun! Alex, Chantal & Youri
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In the previous part of this series we talked about what to cook, so if you haven’t read it yet, take a peek there first. For this part we will focus on the ingredients and where you can buy them. As with the previous chapter, there are some hidden pitfalls in the different ways of how your groceries impact the world. But let’s start simple.
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What do you have? Your first rule of going grocery shopping is to know what you have at home already. Go ahead, take a look in the fridge ‌ and the freezer ‌ and that overhead cupboard as well! Got a list of things you have? Perfect! Now you can go through the ingredients list of your chosen recipes and add what is needed. Simple, right?
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Tying up loose ends Okay, we made our list of things we need for the recipe(s), but let’s say you want to make the vegan wraps from the previous part of the series, for which you buy a pack of 8 wraps. However, you eat only 2 or 3, what happens to the rest? And how long can you keep them? Let’s do this one question at a time: What to do with the leftover food from a big pack? This is where meal planning comes into play. Don’t worry, it will not take a lot of your time, but you can train yourself to know package sizes and plan your meals to use them up. So, if you make wraps one day find another recipe to use the remainder of the pack within the next couple days after that. Need 200 ml of coconut milk, but the store sells 400 ml cans? Maybe you can add it to a curry, or even whip it up to make some cream for your next dessert.
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How long can you store food and where? You’ll definitely get a feeling for this over time, but to help you get started, here is an overview of a few important examples. Now that you know for how long to store different food items, you might want to go back to your list of things you have at home already and see if there is anything perishable that needs to go quickly. Surely you can find a fitting recipe for them!
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Keep in Fridge • Cooked ground poultry or beef
1-2 days
• Cooked meats, fish, stews and soups
3-4 days
• Cooked beans, hummus
5 days
• Hard boiled eggs, chopped veggies
1 week
• Soft cheese after opening
2 weeks
• Hard cheese after opening
5-6 weeks
Keep in Freezer • Soups, stews, cooked beans
2-3 months
• Cooked or ground meat and poultry
3-6 months
• Berries and chopped fruit
6-8 months
• Veggies, if first boiled in hot water
8-12 months
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Store it right It is very important to use all your ingredients and store them correctly to avoid creating food waste. So, if you haven’t already, it’s also worth stocking up on storage containers for your leftovers! When using tupperware or similar containers, make sure to choose the smallest possible size for your leftovers to fit into. This way you will avoid trapping air with your food unnecessarily. Using up all your ingredients not only means you are avoiding food waste and its negative impacts on the world, but also that you save yourself some money. After all, you paid for the entire pack, so you should also eat the entire thing, right? More about the impacts of (food) waste on the climate and the world can be found in the next part of this series by the way!
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Let’s go shopping Grocery shopping can be a bit daunting at times, especially when you have a long list of things to buy. One little trick is to organize your shopping list in the same way the supermarkets are organised. So, write down all your veggies and fruit you want to buy, then the things from the cooling, then the canned goods, and so on. You’ll see it’ll make you whizz through the store in no time.
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Apart from the logistics of grocery shopping, where you are buying your food and especially which foods you are buying can have a far greater impact on the environment than you might imagine. Some part has to do with countries generally operating multi-million import-export economies and the Netherlands are no different in this regard. If you take a minute to think about it, it makes sense, doesn’t it? The oranges imported from Brazil use a lot more fuel in transport to your supermarket than the ones grown nearby, ergo: they have a bigger impact on the climate. Well, it’s not that simple. The impact of a product on climate is determined through many different factors. The distance the product must travel before reaching you is definitely part of this equation, but especially for food there are other factors with a far bigger impact, such as
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land- or fertilizer use. These have been discussed in the previous chapter already, as you know. There is another piece to the puzzle though and it’s a big one too: seasonality. Sometimes, the oranges from Brazil are actually the better option when compared to ones grown locally. This has to do with the fact that the ones that have been grown here in the Netherlands come from a greenhouse, whereas the ones from Brazil grew fairly naturally under an open sky in the summer sun. Now taking fertilizer and the electricity and energy needed to run the greenhouse into account, they often add up to even more emissions than the airplane from Brazil produced.
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So, what is the best option? You have learned that vegetables and fruits are a better alternative to meat and dairy when comparing impact categories described in the first part of the series. To make sure that you don’t unknowingly increase your carbon footprint when shopping for fresh produce, it’s important to buy products that are in season. Every vegetable and fruit have a specific time of year in which it naturally grows best. Simultaneously this is the time when produce needs the least help from us humans. Less interference means less energy or fertilizer and therefore lower emissions during the production process. The other great advantage is that, especially fruits, just taste so much better when they’re grown in their natural season without artificial help!
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That being said, buying locally produced food (which is also in season) is definitely better than imported ones. So, make sure you check the labels next time you are at the supermarket. To get you started on developing a feel for what veggies and fruits to buy what time of the year, we’ve listed a few examples for you:
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Spring
Summer
Asparagus
Artichoke
Beetroot
Bell peppers
Carrots
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Cucumber
Leek
Eggplant
Lettuce
Green beans
Mushrooms
Tomatoes
Onions
Zucchini
Peas Potatoes
Apricots
Radish
Blackberries
Cabbages
Cherries
Spinach
Grapes
Turnips
Mango Melons
Appels
Nectarines
Grapefruit
Peaches
Oranges
Pears
Rhubarb
Raspberries
Strawberries
Redcurrant
Autumn
Winter
Artichoke
Beetroots
Broccoli
Black radish
Brussel sprouts
Brussel sprouts
Carrot
Carrots
Cauliflower
Celery
Chinese cabbage
Leek
Corn
Mushrooms
Fennel
Onions
Parsnip
Parsnip
Red cabbage
Potatoes
String beans
Pumpkin
Zucchini
Red cabbage Savoy cabbage
Apples
Turnips
Bananas
White cabbage
Clementines Melons
Apples
Oranges
Bananas
Pears
Clementines
Prunes
Kiwis
Now that you know the importance of buying seasonal (local) produce, make sure you visit the market in Delft! It is held every Thursday and Saturday, on and around the main market square. The market does sell produce grown outside their natural season, so be aware of that. Nevertheless, most things sold here are fresh and tasty and vegetables and fruits are usually cheaper than in the supermarkets. Here you can find a list of our other favourite shops in Delft that sell sustainable produce: Ekoplaza If you’re looking for a supermarket in which you have a lot of organic produce and other products, Ekoplaza is the place to be.
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Molen de Roos At Windmill the Rose you can buy the flour and other products that are produced in the Delft mill. Hoeve Biesland It is a factory in Delfgauw, usually open until 17:00 which sells fresh eggs and milk (cheap) and also local vegetables (a bit more expensive). Odin Delft Odin is a cooperative supermarket offering organic food. They don’t aim for profit, keep their own bees and culture seed-resistant breeds of fruits and vegetables. Op Hodenpijl Organic vegetables, apples, meat and eggs straight from the farm!
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Gimsel Supermarket for natural food & cosmetics. Here you will find organic bread, vegetables, fruit, cheese, fish, meat substitutes & groceries. You can find all these shops including more information on what they are selling on the map of the GreenTU using this QR-code.
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What is the best packaging? You know all about how to pick the most sustainably produced foods now, but have you ever thought about the impact of packaging? I know, I know, yet another factor to keep in mind, this is getting complicated. But just hear me out. Packaging of food products serves multiple purposes and is not a bad thing in and of itself. It has to preserve and protect the food inside, especially for merchandise and distribution. There are many kinds of packaging materials like aluminium, glass and plastics, sometimes carton and paper. So, which one is the most sustainable? Unfortunately there is no clear answer to this, since it depends on a lot of different factors.
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Every packaging material has its pros and cons with regard to the whole life cycle of the product. And the methods used in performing the life cycle assessment have an influence on the results too. For example, if you want to compare wine alternatives, you will have many kinds of packages to choose from: beverage cartons, PET bottles, glass bottles and even stand-up pouches. Before you can start comparing the impacts of these on various environmental indicators like land use or climate change you will have to make more decisions, like if the packaging can only be used once. The outcomes could be entirely different based on decisions like these, which is why there is always a lot of discussion about this. So let’s compare single-use packaging only. To compare the different options, we will analyze several LCA studies. If we compare it to the CO2 footprint,
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the beverage carton has the lowest impact, but with regard to land use, the beverage carton scores higher than the alternatives, due to its use of paperboard. When we look at the effects it has on the cycling of nutrients, the beverage carton scores the best, again. So if you want to buy some wine, and you want to get some sustainable packaging, you should consider the beverage carton (we did not take taste into account, that’s up to you ;) ).
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