Rain Perry

You find yourself with a mostly empty jar of jam - or peanut butter or Nutella or Speculoo. Do you toss it in the recycling? Well, no, because as my husband's cousin, whose family was in the waste management business (for real, not the Tony Soprano version), explains: leaving crusty food inside jars makes them much harder to recycle and more likely to end up in the landfill.

So how do you avoid that while not catching yourself in a moral quandary by wasting water rinsing out the jar just to feel good about recycling?

The simple answer is the same answer for many questions: ice cream! Take your mostly empty jar and add a scoop of ice cream to it. Stir it around to pick up the remaining raspberry or peanut goodness. And a jar with milkfat is easier to quickly rinse out (in dishwater is fine).

A win-win!