Eco Back-to-School: Green lunches

Recycla has been a school parent for seven years and, in all that time, her children have never once bought lunch at their school. They don’t like the food and, frankly, Recycla understands completely.  Any time she has been at the girls’ schools for lunch, she has been horrified by the pre-packaged garbage being served to the students.

Therefore, the children pack their lunches EVERY DAY, which translates to nearly 2,000 packed lunches (and counting). Recycla has a LOT of experience packing lunches and has learned much over the years about how to be as environmentally friendly as possible in the process.

(The Waltons lunch box shown above is what Recycla carried when she was in elementary school.  Since she’s feeling a bit nostalgic, she decided to include a photo of it, just because.)

Let’s start at the beginning: the lunch box. Not all lunch boxes are created equal. For example, some soft vinyl lunch boxes contain dangerous levels of lead and far too many others contain polyvinyl chloride (PVC), including most of the ones sold at big box stores.  As the Green Mommy discussed yesterday, PVC is not a safe material.  Recycla concurs, so she hunted around for lunch boxes she could trust.

Luckily, there are a wide variety of safe lunch boxes out there.

Recycla’s daughters have lunch boxes from Lands’ End and L.L. Bean. Both companies’ offerings are PVC- and lead-free. Lands’ End now also has an eco-friendly lunch box that is made from 100% recycled materials. One of Recycla’s daughters has been using her Lands’ End lunch box for five years (and counting) and it looks as good as new. Recycla’s other daughter’s L.L. Bean lunch box has lasted for four years. These lunch boxes are a good deal and they clean easily.

There are loads of other great eco options out there:

• The Reuseit Insulated Lunchbag is large enough to hold even the hungriest student’s lunch.  It’s made in the USA from 100% recycled plastic. The material is PVC-free, lead-free, and can keep food cool until lunchtime, thanks to the nontoxic ice pack (included).
• Another option is this three-tier stainless steel lunch carrier at To-Go Ware.
• Of course, one of the easiest and safest options is the good old-fashioned lunch bag. Cloth — not paper. Recycla found dozens and dozens of cute cloth bags at Etsy.

Once you have chosen a lunch box (or bag or other container), the next question is: How do you wrap up the food that goes inside? Naturally, Recycla encourages you to go with reusable containers instead of plastic bags and aluminum foil.

Here are some great food storage options that Recycla has seen recently:

• Lunchskins pouches are moisture-proof and a great alternative to plastic baggies. They come in all different sizes and designs, so use them for sandwiches, veggies, crackers or any other lunch goodies. When you’re done, just toss them in the dishwasher.
• For sandwiches, you might try reusable sandwich wraps. You can make your own or you can easily find a wide variety at Etsy.
• For other foods, such as fruits and veggies, side dishes, etc., the best thing you can do is switch to reusable food containers.  Your options are plastic, metal, and glass, although many schools discourage the use of glass and Recycla is personally wary since it breaks so easily.  The most common option is small plastic containers; however, there are a lot of reasons not to use plastic.  Recycla uses a combination of plastic and metal and is phasing out the plastic as things break.  For metal, take a look at this, this, and this.
• If you want to make this whole process as easy as possible, check out these cute lunch kits at By Nature.

For utensils, Recycla’s children carry the real deal, not plastic.  If you’re worried that your child might accidentally throw away his fork, buy some inexpensive flatware from a thrift shop, so that you’re not out much money if something ends up in the trash. (Recycla usually finds it for around $0.25 per piece.)

For your child’s drink, juice boxes are — duh — wasteful, as are disposable water bottles and those wee cartons of milk.  Pack a reusable water bottle instead.  Sure it will cost you some money up front, but you’ll recover the dollars spent pretty quickly.

And have you considered swapping out disposable paper napkins for cloth ones?  Recycla’s family uses cloth napkins for most meals, but does have some eco paper napkins (made out of recycled paper) for occasional use and also for her daughters’ school lunches.  The girls always bring the paper napkins home and, if they’re too dirty to be used another time, they toss them in the compost bin.  This year, however, Recycla is going to try using cloth napkins in the girls’ lunches.  While she already has lots of cloth napkins that she has accumulated over the years, she’s thinking about cutting up some of her husband’s old shirts to make more.

As for the food that goes into the lunch boxes, Recycla encourages you to avoid buying foods that are packaged by the serving, such as grab-and-go bags of chips. It really doesn’t take much time to put foods into reusable containers and you’ll waste far fewer resources in the process. Recycla usually spends 5-10 minutes on Sunday evenings preparing containers for the week, so that all she has to do on school mornings is reach into the pantry for the necessary containers. Obviously, this doesn’t work as well for fresh foods, such as grapes or carrot sticks, but it’s great for other foods like raisins, popcorn, nuts, etc.  For fruits, veggies, and yogurt, Recycla’s girls fill the containers the night before and store them in the fridge until the next morning.

(By the way, you do know that so-called baby carrots are a waste of money and resources, right?)

A no-waste lunch box is the ultimate goal, but Recycla admits that it is not always feasible. Even she will resort to using plastic bags on occasion, such as when the girls go on field trips and their schools demand that the students bring lunches in disposable packaging.  (And this bothers one of Recycla’s daughters so much that she brings everything home so that it can at least be recycled.)

The important thing is to take that first step and eliminate just one single plastic bag or juice box every day. Once you do that, take the next step and make another change. And so on and so on.

Tell the Eco Women:  Do your kids buy their lunches at school or pack?

All images courtesy of their parent companies’ websites. The Eco Women are not employed by any of the companies mentioned, nor were they paid to review these products.