How reorganising your fridge saves food, money, energy — and the planet

Home organiser Hazel Burton says a weekly refrigerator reset is more sustainable, while cutting costs, food waste and stress levels

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It's the most important, time-sensitive form of storage we have anywhere in the house, and yet, if it were a larder, cupboard, or a wardrobe, we would complain long and loud about its spatial shortcomings. Fridge/freezers are compact, even in a hunky two-door American. With thick, insulated walls and limited shelf positions, what you see is most certainly not what you get in cubic centimetres of interior storage. Muck up the footprint of one fresh-baked pizza box back in the darker reaches of the fridge, and fidgeting in the family shopping can be truly soul-destroying at 6pm with hungry troops staging a coup.

Then there’s the food waste. The creep that most of us don’t notice, and due to the vertical up-thrust of a typical fridge, we often cannot even monitor. What’s shoved rudely behind a tall pot of Greek yoghurt and half a head of cabbage can sit there and slip past its best-by date in just a day or two. In 2025, iReach carried out research that showed that in a 12-month period, the average Irish home threw out up to €700 of waste food. Don’t feel smug — that’s 71% of us incidentally. This sloppy, climate-destroying nonsense is largely down to poor or absolutely no meaningful organisation whatsoever. €700 paid out for nothing but a bigger bin bill — that should give us all searing focus for change.