Waste Free Wednesday!

Let's talk lunch.  Every Wednesday I get up even earlier than usual, because on Wednesdays I have to pack 3 lunches instead of just one. Next school year, when the twins start kindergarten, I will be packing 3 lunches every single week day, and 4 lunches on the 2 days a week that the little peanut has preschool. I'm not an early morning person as it is, but I do feel good about making sure my kids, when eating away from home, have a safe and nutritious meal.  That doesn't mean I'm not cursing the sun for staying in bed longer than I do on those cold, dark mornings, but it is one of the things that I get up and do no matter what.  It's more nutritious because they eat fresh fruit and veggies, a sandwich or homemade soup and often baked goods made here, and therefore free of all of the extra salt, sugar and weird, unpronounceable and unnecessary crap that is in prepared packaged food from the store.  Sometimes I toss in oreos or something like that as a treat, but generally they eat what we call "real food".  Safe, because of some serious and necessary dietary restrictions for my oldest daughter. More on that in another post. 

So that is one part of stumbling, bleary eyed and half asleep, into the kitchen to pack lunch before the sun comes up, and yet feeling good that it is the right thing to do and also, for us, a necessity. **Feel free to leave a comment if you have interest in future posts about packing fun and healthy lunches that kids actually eat!** In the mean time, that brings me to the actual reason for posting today.  From my perspective, packing food from home has no down side.  It's healthier, cheaper, and easier to tailor to picky eaters or food allergies and sensitivities.  I have actually heard the argument, however, that it is more wasteful.  Once I stopped chuckling, I realized that this was being presented as an actual argument.

On one hand, I could sort of understand.  According to the EPA, "The average American school-age child throws away 67 pounds of lunch waste a year. With the population of kids in the US alone accounting for over 70 million, that’s over 4.6 billion pounds of waste that could be easily avoided."  I remember taking a family trip to the zoo with my husband and all 4 kids.  For each kid we packed pretzels, a sandwich, some grapes and carrot sticks with a little tub of hummus to dip.  Mark and I had veggie wraps and celery with hummus.  Grand total? 20...yes 20 plastic baggies...in addition to 6 single use plastic hummus containers and a stack of paper napkins. Yikes. Passing that giant landfill on the way in and out of Philly didn't make me feel any better. Thank goodness everyone had sippy cups or thermoses, and we packed everything in a reusable insulated lunch tote.  That was over 2 years ago, and that day is still fresh in my mind. The point here is that it certainly can be more wasteful, but it doesn't have to be, and it doesn't have to be difficult, either.

Now, I'm not opposed to taking short cuts for convenience sometimes.  In fact, I think it is necessary for the sake of sanity.  We cloth diapered our kids, but certainly used more disposables with each new addition to the family. But when it comes to something like packing lunches, the little plastic baggies aren't saving me any time, and neither are the paper napkins.  We have a system now that works so well for us, and is essentially waste free. First of all, each kid has their own insulated lunch tote.  I made the ones that our kids carry, but there is certainly no shortage of cute and durable ones available in stores or online. You could buy brown paper bags, but why?  They are cheap, but buying pack after pack for the number of years that a lunch tote will last makes them actually cost more, plus they end up in a landfill, if you do a little reading you will find that paper doesn't break down any faster than anything else in a landfill. A head of lettuce takes 7 years to decompose in a landfill environment.  Just saying...



Moving on.  Plenty of people already carry reusable lunch boxes, bags or totes.  The nitty gritty of what I'm getting to is coming up now.  Reusable snack bags.  Sandwich wraps.  Bento boxes. Thermoses. This is what we pack food in now.  There is absolutely no difference in the amount of time it takes to stick a handfull of pretzels into a reusable cloth baggie vs. a plastic sandwich baggie.  No difference in sealing the velcro top vs. sealing the ziploc top. Much cuter and just as easy for your kid to open. Reusable.  No waste.  No landfill. Same deal as the brown paper bags and lunch boxes, the reusable option costs more up front, but over the course of a year, it's no more expensive, and actually is likely to save some money.  For sandwiches, we use sandwich wraps. You can find them in different sizes and shapes, but ours are basically a square that you lay the sandwich on, then fold opposite corners over (on ours they fasten with velcro) to hold the sandwich in.  Added bonus, when my kids unwrap the sandwich, they use the open mat as a placemat on the dirty public table.  As far as clean up, they stuff everything back into the lunch box and bring it home.  After school, I brush the crumbs out of anything that needs it.  Anything that is icky (Juice from grapes in the snack bag, mayo on the sandwich wrap, etc.) I just toss in the laundry pile.  Machine wash and dry, no special care needed.  Everything is lined with rip-stop nylon.  If they have something really juicy, I just use small Tupperware type containers (pudding, for example, is too wet for the nylon snack bags.  Although I doubt most people would use a ziploc bag for pudding anyway...) We invested in a decent hot food thermos, a flip straw drink thermos and a bento box for each child. Laptop Lunches makes great bento box sets.  The lunch totes that I sell in my etsy shop, like the one pictured above, are insulated, machine washable, and designed to fit Laptop Lunch bento boxes perfectly.  These items will last close to forever.  I'm pretty sure my mom still has my old school thermos in her basement someplace.  Last but not least, each kid has a set of 5 (one for each day of the week) lunchbox napkins.  These are small (about 11 inches square) cloth napkins we use exclusively for packing lunches. Since there is one for each day of the week, they go into the laundry pile as needed and as long as you do laundry once a week,you should be fine.