Home Organization Tips

Now that I’ve got my children’s lunch preparation down to a system, I decided to throw a wench in the process.  Life is only fun when you’re constantly shaking things up, right?  Seriously, though, I’ve decided to put more effort into creating green lunches for my kids.  This doesn’t mean that I’m never going to buy processed food again, but it does mean that I want to start implementing little strategies to create green lunch ideas for kids.

The suggestions that I’ve accumulated focus on how I package my children’s lunch bags and what I’ve purchased to do so.  Another time we’ll explore creating healthy lunch food that is also good for the environment.

1.   Drink Containers: One very easy way to help the environment is to purchase a water bottle that your child will take to school each day.  We found cute water bottles that have decorative, insulated covers.  Assuming that my kids don’t lose these, they’ll be able to refill them each morning and carry them to school.  They can refill them, as necessary at school, and then bring them home at the end of the day.  Rather than purchasing a new water bottle or juice box all the time, this will ensure that we do our part to save the environment and to avoid having more trash build up.  For the winter, I plan to purchase a thermos for each kid so that they can bring hot drinks with them.

2.   Children’s Lunch Boxes & Supplies: This is an incredibly easy way to go green.  Rather than sending kids with a throw-away lunch bag each day, I’ve purchased a reusable lunch box for each child.  After shopping around, I found lunch boxes that have reusable plastic containers in them.  Each of these cool lunch bags has four compartments with four little, colorful Tupperware-like containers.  This way, I avoid sending the kids with plastic bags to school (more on that below) and can use washable containers instead.  Similarly, each kid has a cloth napkin and reusable utensils.  While this is a bit of a pain for me (since throwing out paper napkins and plastic forks is so much easier!) it really cuts down on waste and helps the environment.

3.   More on Plastic Bags: I found a site that sells adorable reusable bags and I was reading about the impact that plastic bags can have on the environment.  The EPA estimates that 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year.  When I think about it, I usually send each of my five children to school with three plastic bags – that’s 15 bags a day just in my house!  Plastic bags, I discovered, make up over 10% of debris found on US Coastlines and each bag takes over 1,000 years to break down.  This information has definitely inspired me to either use Tupperware containers, or to use reusable bags for the lunches.

I’ve begun training my kids to understand the environmental impact that their actions have.  They recognize that their green lunch bag, and all supplies in it, needs to be brought home each day and they know why.  I’ve created a shelf in my roll-out pantry that is just for the children’s lunch bags and supplies.  When they come home from school, they take their lunch bag out and place it in a large wicker basket that I have next to the sink.  I clean and dry all of the supplies, and then place each green lunch bag on the pantry shelf.  Easily retrieved the next morning, the bag is ready to go for another green day!

Posted on October 26th, 2009 by Romi
Filed under: organizing tips, Household Management, To Your Health, Kid-friendly