Change the World Wednesday - 23rd May 2012 - Packed Lunches

This weeks Change the World Wednesday Challenge is to make a waste free lunch.

Five mornings a week I make up packed lunches for myself and our two children hence this challenge is particularly appropriate.  In terms of packaging, this is the most wasteful meal of our day and it can only be marked as a "fail - must try harder".

But I'll start with the good bits. I'm a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to packed lunches: the cornerstone of any packed lunch should be a piece. It can be a cheese piece, jeely piece, cheese and jeely piece or any other type of piece: egg, ham, tuna, banana - anything that fits between two slices of bread. We do well here with home made bread. It has flour, yeast, water, sugar and salt. No preservatives, no additives, no packaging (the flour comes in biodegradable paper bags) and no transportation.

So far so good but when all the additional things are included we start to go down hill. The children take refillable water bottles to school for during the day but single use cartons of fruit juice for lunch. You know the type: plasticy cardboard cartons with a plastic straw in a polythene wrapper glued to the side. Then there are crisps, raisins or other dried fruit, pots of yoghurt and cereal bars or biscuits - not everything every day but two or three from the list. Almost all have packaging.

We have tried buying in bulk then filling reusable containers but the kids keep losing lids or breaking the containers. Understandably, they have more important things to do at lunch time, like playing hopscotch, skipping or football, rather than putting their lunch things away properly.

I look forward to reading other posts on this challenge in the hope of gaining inspiration.

Related links: If you don't know what a jeelly piece is, this link may help:

Plastic bags: it's not all about carbon

I recently read an article which discussed how we could tackle the problem of the 800,000 tonnes of plastic bags thrown away each year in Europe, an average of 191 for every citizen of the European Union.  It highlighted the much smaller carbon footprint of disposable single use plastic carrier bags compared with alternatives.  Part of the article described re-using plastic bags as bin liners rather than using purpose made bin liners and it had a nifty graphic .  To a point, this makes sense but considering that many people use plastic bags for almost all of their domestic purchases, then to use every carrier bag once as a bin liner would require all that was bought to be disposed of in the bin.  I know that there is a lot of waste packaging in groceries but it does generally compact down to a smaller volume than the original (unless you live entirely on tinned produce) therefore assuming that all plastic bags are re-used in this way is stretching things a bit.  To then hypothesise that they could be used three times as bin liners is clearly not relevant.

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