To job your memory, here are the suggestions I made in this week's newsletter:
Recycle it: Though we try not to use it very often, when we do, we rinse and recycle aluminum foil.
Reuse it: When we send the kids off to school or camp, we pack their lunches and snacks in reusable containers—we even wash and reuse their plastic utensils and baggies.
Unplug it: We recently realized that we can live without the extra refrigerator in the basement. We still have it down there just in case, but it’s unplugged so it’s no longer draining energy. We’ve also started unplugging our laptops at night to conserve energy.
Say no to plastic or paper: I have now converted to bringing my own bags to the grocery store, farmer’s market, and other errands nearly 100% of the time. I keep the bags in the car at all times so I don’t have to challenge my faulty memory by remembering to bring them when I shop.
Bundle errands to save on gas and reduce traffic and pollution: When we have an errand to do, we try to think of every other routine errand that’s in the same direction so we can make them all in one trip.
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5 comments:
I am inudated with perfectly clean fliers, documents and other paper notices that come to me with print on only one side of the page. Instead of recycling the paper straight away, I first put it in my printer to print all of my draft or non-official work on the unused side of the paper. I also use less-tidy paper or the clean bottom portion or backs of junk mail for my scrap paper before I recycle that. It is amazing how much paper I save by reusing before I recycle.
Also as a teacher of young children, I notice that many children take only a few sips of their lunch time juice box and then declare it finished. An opened juice box cannot travel back home in a child's lunch bag; so often a practically full juice box gets thrown away. Parents could save a lot of money as well as curb their consumption of extra manufacturing if they used a washable, reusable water bottle, such as a Rubbermaid closable straw cup, instead of a juice box.
We have identified the biggest source of waste (both of expense and of trash) in our kids' lunches, and it is single-serve packaging. Of anything, any kind - juice, chips, yogurt, gummies, whatever. Now we use small tupperware bottles for drinks, as the previous poster mentioned, but also have a little portioning party each Sunday, when the kids line up a week's worth of small plastic containers and fill them with their snacks of choice, single servings of yogurt, cookies, whatever. This saves me from having to do the 6AM scramble, I can just grab and stuff, and they are happy to get to mix and match their snacks. I also save those little squat spice containers with the red plastic lids, as they make great containers for small treats. Little glass jars from things like pimentos, capers, or pine nuts make great single-serve containers for salad dressing, ranch dip, or peanut butter. If you don't mind investing a little, Laptop Lunches makes a compartmentalized lunch box modeled on the bento box, complete with drink container.
Great tips in the comments here as well. I use the lock & lock containers for kids lunches and save baggies. We fill a water bottle with gatorade for camp and a plastic juice box container for other kids soymilk. It was so expensive buying the three pack at Whole Foods for almost one dollar each pint.
Here is an alternative to sandwich bags:
http://www.reusablebags.com/store/wrapnmat%AE-set-of-3-p-137.html
My son (age 7) has been using them since the middle of this past school year and he has not lost one! Must be the novelty. We use the whole set -- one for sandwich, one for raw veggies and one for apple slices.
The website also sells mesh produce bags and the bento box-style lunch boxes mentioned in another post.
Liz
We pack to go glass containers for food when we go out to dinner. This way the hot food can go in and we have know packed a lunch for tomorrow in a heatable container and NO styrofoam or bulky boxes in the fridge.
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