A child who takes a lunch to school will produce about 70 pounds of garbage every year.

Seventy. Pounds. When I read that, I didn’t believe it and went right away to look it up somewhere else. Yup. The numbers come in at 45-90 pounds per student per year. That’s the weight of a 10 year old.

Going litterless means avoiding what Gillian Deacon calls the The Sinister P’s of food:

• prepared
• processed
• packaged

As a general rule, these foods tend to be less healthy, more expensive and wasteful: three good reasons to avoid them. Buy in bulk and pack food in reusable containers to save money on over-priced individual portions and food wraps and to avoid producing all those pounds of garbage.

But how to go about it? It isn’t as hard as it seems, once you make the choice to do it. You may need to invest in a few things, but the cost will be offset by the money saved by packing lunches in a new way and by the good feeling from just Doing the Right Thing.

Avoid juice boxes, bottled water and cans of pop. Pack juice or filtered tap water in a good reusable container. Avoid plastic bottles and don’t reuse the bottles from bottled water. Use stainless or lined aluminum containers. Stainless steel thermoses are easy to find.

Fresh fruit comes pre-wrapped in it’s own skin. Easy-peasy. Use cloth napkins and avoid plastic cutlery. If you don’t want to send you regular forks and spoons to school for fear of being lost, a quick trip to your local Value Village or a yard sale or two should be enough to stock up on cheap stainless cutlery to use in packed lunches.

Pack sandwiches and other food in reusable containers with lids. Apparently, Tupperware, Gladware and Ziplock tubs are now made without phthalates or PVC. Baggies are handy, but make sure they come home and get washed and reused. Alternatively, sandwiches can be wrapped in a reuseable wrap. I’ve seen some online made from the plastic-coated fabric used to make ‘rubber pants’ to go over cloth diapers. Some people love them, others say the fabric has an odour they don’t like. Highly recommended is the Wrap-N-Mat. Machine washable, it is used to wrap food and then opens up into a place mat for your dining pleasure. Cool :)

We’ve opted for a Laptop Lunch lunchbox. I saw them at Whole Foods about a month ago and recognised them right away from the (no longer updated, but still awesome and worth checking out) blog Vegan Lunch Box.
It works well. According to Jordan, it is awesome and he loves it and all those little boxes are cool. Besides the fact that the Laptop Lunch is the gateway to the golden land of the litterless lunch, I like it because when it’s early morning and I haven’t had any coffee and the baby is hanging on my leg and whining, all those little boxes make it easy to make sure I’ve put everything in there. Environmentally friendly AND brain helpful! Lead and phthalate free! Plus, no baggies to wash. A lunchbox can’t get much better than that. It comes with a fork and spoon and a great book full of tips, recipes and other information. Of course, Jordan teams his with his dragon Sigg water bottle.

Now for the math. I am all about the measurable results, so here we go…
Let’s say that a child produces 70 pounds of garbage every year from his or her lunches. And lets say there are 200 school days in a year. That means about 0.35 pounds of garbage per meal. Jordan doesn’t take a lunch to school every day since he homeschools, but he does pack a lunch about forty times a year. 40 x 0.35 = 14.

Fourteen pounds of garbage NOT produced by my family every year. Excellent :D

Green For Life by Gillian Deacon.
Laptop Lunch . This website is packed with great information.
Vegan Lunch Box. Use the archives and start at the beginning to see some great examples of amazing packed lunches. Those meals are pure nutrition.

There is an update to this post here.