Green Your Routine Challenge: The Litterless Lunch

At the end of August,  I told you about the Green Your Routine Challenge that I was doing to get the school year started.  This week's topic is the litterless lunch.

Author Gillian Deacon states that the average Canadian child throws away sixty seven pounds of food packaging waste a year (Source: "Green for Life").  Switching to litterless options can also save money on your grocery bill because you buy less cling wrap and less baggies.

We have slowly been making the transition to litterless lunches.  It has taken us two years, but the kids' lunches are almost entirely waste free.

We have so many water bottles around our house.  I love the Klean Kanteen ones for myself.  But I found that the kids would throw the bottles back into their lunch bags with out closing the drinking spout and that would leak all over their lunch bags and into their back packs.  Enter the Thermos brand water bottles.  It is a snap lid with a straw.  The kids love pushing the button and clicking the cap.  These water bottles also keep drinks cold.  I also bought a Thermos food container for each kid because it adds more options to lunches.

For snacks and sandwiches, I bought these snap and lock plastic containers because both my kids can open these on their own and this makes snack time easier at school.  I also bought some of these reusable snack bags from Etsy for dry snacks such as fish crackers.

As I mentioned in my first Green Your Routine Challenge post, I am partnering up with Seventh Generation and taking part in the Green Your Routine Challenge.  Throughout this month, I will blogging about our journey as we adjust to our new routines and work towards leading a greener life. 

This is the starter kit that Seventh Generation that I received to help us on the Green Your Routine Challenge. It also includes a lunch bag not pictured here.  

As part of my challenge, I am giving away one of these starter kits.  Leave a comment below telling me one thing you do to make packing a litterless lunch easier.  For an additional entry into the giveaway,  like the Seventh Generation Facebook page and come back here and tell me that you did so in the comment section. All comments from this post and subsequent, "Green Your Routine Challenge" posts (there will be one more) will be numbered in order and I will select one through a random number generator.  The winner will be announced on Wednesday, October 3, 2012.  This giveaway is open to Canadian residents only.