Yotam Ottolenghi Quotes

The purpose - where I start - is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it's reuse.

There is no such thing as waste. It is just a question of whether we know how to use something or not.

Even clingfilm - if it's gone over a salad bowl, take it off, use it again. I wash out carrier bags; I save brown paper from parcels. I save string; I save ribbons. I separate all my bits and pieces.

Reducing and reusing take nothing more than a rethink on the way we shop, and using our imagination with the things that we might once have considered junk.

We need to throw away less, recycle a lot more and turn much of the rest into energy.

I always grew up watching things transform, and a lot of that was what we would call trash.

I was brought up to reuse things.

I'm mad keen on recycling because I'm worried about the next generation and where all this waste we're producing is going. It has to stop. I wash out my plastic containers and recycle envelopes, everything I possibly can.

Nothing is wasted.

Not everything needs to be recycled.

I'm a leftover junkie.

I work with things left over from other things.

Freecycle groups match people who have things they want to get rid of with people who can use them.

We can't have landfills forever, and we can't ask others to accept our trash.

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

When you have all these traces of trash moving around, you can ask yourself how can we make the system more efficient. Then we can make better decisions. And perhaps we will not throw away the plastic bottles that go every day to the dump.

Buying found objects means repurposing something that was already made years before, sometimes decades before. It strikes a nice balance between the new and used equation we should strive for in our lives.

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today.

I've been using carrot tops to make pesto and broccoli stalks to make broccoli 'rice.' There's no reason to throw those things away - just get creative.

Restaurants should be forced to recycle their leftovers for animal consumption - and should create fewer leftovers in the first place.

I can never waste water. If I cannot drink it I will use it to water the plants and I will never waste food. If it is inedible it goes on the compost heap.

There is no 'recycle too much.' That's an oxymoron.

I'd take garbage, and I'd glue them together and create inventions.

I'm a recycling obsessive.