My son came home from school yesterday with food across the front of his shirt. When we asked him why he was such a mess, he said it was “No Waste” day at school. No one was supposed to use anything disposable so they were asked to take their lunch in reusable containers. They were not allowed to use disposable napkins, and since he forgot to take a cloth napkin, he had to use … his shirt. That’s fine – at least they made an effort to teach students how small changes can help the environment. The lesson was part of their Earth Day celebration.
When you are able to take the time to investigate where your food originates and how choosing real food can affect your health and wellbeing, you naturally tune in to how it relates to the health of our planet. I have covered various other ways we can help our planet at home and in the workplace besides food choices, like composting, having a reusable mug, and collecting rain water. Here are some more things I do to conserve waste if you’re interested, and please feel free to share your original ideas too.
Reduce: Unplugging the kitchen appliances when we’re not using them. We don’t use our toaster, blender, electric mixer, or coffee maker every day, so we only plug them in when we need to use them.
Reuse: I keep a paper wine bottle bag in my trunk with the reusable shopping bags. If I ever stop to buy a bottle of wine, I take in the same bag and keep reusing it. Once it becomes dangerously thin, like tissue thin, I blow my nose in it – just kidding – I recycle it and get a new one, but why not reuse it in the meantime? I keep one of those cardboard coffee cup sleeves in my purse, so if I ever stop to buy a coffee, which is a rare occasion, I hand them the sleeve to reuse and say, “Here, please use this.” I’ve found that if I don’t say that, they have no idea why I’m handing them the cup sleeve, because only a weirdo would be handing them a cup sleeve – but I’m hoping to start a trend. Americans use over 3 billion cup sleeves a year. If I put a yogurt and plastic spoon in the kids’ lunches, they bring home the empty container to rinse and recycle, and the spoon to wash and put back in the drawer. They can use the same spoon all year or at least quite a few times until they lose it. I also tried buying the yogurt in the large container and giving them a serving in plastic with a lid. That’s the most conservative way to get a better deal on the yogurt and eliminate the single-use packaging – it just takes more time to pack.
Recycle: If you’re not separating your recyclables yet, you can use any bucket and during the week throw the plastic and any cans in it. We use a large bucket from the cat litter. It’s amazing how much we accumulate – the recycle collection here is only every two weeks and our 50 gallon roll-out container is always full. The most efficient way to separate waste is like they do at Whole Foods – the waste is divided in three parts so people automatically separate trash, recyclable, and compostable.
