What a waste
The numbers don’t lie: children’s lunches create a lot of garbage every day. Googling for some statistics, we pulled together some interesting tidbits:
- The typical child generates 67 pounds of lunchtime trash per year
- 38 billion plastic water bottles end up in landfills each year and take 700 years before they start to decompose
- Trash is often mistaken for food and eaten by ocean life
- 1.5 million barrels of oil are used in making plastic baggies and plastic bottles each year
An unscientific lunchtime experiment
18 hungry second graders created a pound of waste at lunchtime
We’ve been trying our hand at reducing our child’s “trash footprint” at lunchtime. Our daughter brings everything to school in reusable containers or wraps and uses a cloth napkin, resulting in a completely waste-free lunch (barring the occasional pre-packaged string cheese wrapper). But, we wondered about the aggregate impact of the cafeteria she eats in. Does it live up to the numbers?
So, for one day, we sent her to school with a mission: to collect trash from just one friend’s lunch. She decided to do better, collecting her entire table’s garbage, comprised of 18 second graders. The result: 1 pound of garbage (see picture at right). With 18 tables in that lunch period, and 4 lunch periods, that makes for almost 80 pounds of garbage per day from her elementary school alone. Doing the math, though, yields an average of 10 pounds of annual garbage for a child during a normal 180-day school year. Better than 67 and the DEC’s estimate of 40-90 below, but still not as good as it could be…
Here are some ideas for packing an environmentally-friendly lunch…
Ditch the paper and plastic
- Pack a cloth napkin. Buy several of these at the beginning of the school year. You can write fun notes to your child in permanent marker on them, which will make lunchtime extra fun. At the end of the week, toss it in your clothes washer!
- Forks and spoons. Instead of using plastic forks and spoons, find something from your utensil drawer you can part with (we’ve lost our “real” silverware on a few occasions!) You can also head over to your local Salvation Army or thrift store and pick up an affordable selection of tableware for your lunchbox!
Plastic wrap and aluminum foil? Not necessarily…
“One student taking a disposable lunch to school every day will create 40-90 pounds of garbage per year.” - NYS dept of Environmental Conservation
- If your child’s school has a recycling program accepting plastic wrap, wrapping your sandwiches may be a fine solution.
- One of our favorite products is the Wrap-N-Mat for sandwiches (see below to purchase from our store). We use reusable containers for a lot of things, but this one takes the cake for clean-up.
- We also love the reusable sandwich bags from MamaMade for dry snacks. Perfect little earth-friendly snack bags with a velcro closure, these can be popped into the washer at the end of the week.
- Reusable containers are a wonderful solution for packing an earth friendly lunch (if your child can remember to bring them back home). Get a few locking sandwich containers (check our our recommended products below, or visit our store)
- Forgetful children may use a food storage container that was purchased with food in it, like a cottage cheese container. If they forget to bring it home, it isn’t a big loss.
More about Amy and Scott Dawson, creators of Lunchtaker.com: One of our core focuses is on nutrition and fitness. Our children both attended a parent cooperative pre-school where the morning snack was as healthy as possible, and our family liked the opportunities for new foods that arose in pre-school. As our children go through grade school, we are focusing on continuing the trend of ensuring we feed ourselves a variety of foods, all good for our bodies... read more...
Posted Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 8:43 am and filed under Dietary Guidelines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
