When you want to have an eco-friendly move, you do things like using reusable moving bins and finding containers around the house to help save on moving supplies. One thing you may not have thought of though is that you can increase the eco-friendliness of the move by packing your kitchen last.

This is because you’ll be more likely to eat up the last of the food before the move rather than throwing it away and you won’t be relying on extra take-out where you’ll be throwing away wasteful Styrofoam containers all week. For these reasons and more, packing the kitchen last will allow you to have a more eco-friendly move. Take a look at the best way to pack your kitchen and why you should do it last.

Less wasteful pantry and fridge

One major perk of waiting to pack your kitchen until last is that you’ll have the ability to cook at home for a longer time before the move. Moving often means there is going to be a lot of take-out and not enough home-cooked meals.

Saving the packing of the kitchen until last means you’ll have access to your utensils, pots and pans, dinner plates, and knives all of the way up until right before the move in order to cook regular meals and finish up the food you still have in your fridge.

While you can take your pantry items with you, many people end up tossing them or giving them away which means you’ve wasted money on them and you’re spending money eating out when you have food at home that could be made. The eco choice would be to not waste that food still at home and to avoid eating out when you could be cooking.

Avoiding paper plates

When you do decide to order pizzas and Chinese delivery, you end up buying waste paper plates and plastic cups instead of using what you own. This means you are tossing away more environmentally harmful items and killing trees to provide you with dinner plates.

Instead, you could use your own supplies at home and cook meals up until a day or two before the move to ensure you don’t have to buy plastic and take-out. When the whole family teams up to prepare meals the week of the move and then pack the kitchen up last together, everything still gets done and you got to enjoy waste-free homemade dinners all week.

Simplify and pack the kitchen

When it’s time to start packing the kitchen, you’ll first want to make sure there is nothing you may want to donate that you don’t use anymore. Then you can start sorting things by the essentials, like silverware and the coffeemaker, to the seldom used, like the platters and vases, in order to pack properly.

If you pack the things you rarely use first, then you can leave the items you use daily in a more accessible way. Pack things like the fine china, cookbooks, platters, and pitchers separately from things like the cutting knives, dinner plates, bowls, and glassware. Then make sure you prepare a bin of things you’ll use when you arrive, such as dishwasher detergent, sponges, kitchen towels, and coffee filters, in a handy place so that you can get into your new kitchen without missing a beat.

You may be tempted to pack the kitchen first since it can sometimes feel like the hardest room to pack, but save this one for last to contribute to a more eco-friendly move.