12 months of Greening - February - Rubbish Free Lunches

I thought I'd better get back to my 12 months of greening posts before another month clicks over and before I forget what we did back then.

Today I thought I'd post about February.  In February, the boys went back to school, so it seemed sensible to make our challenge school oriented.  We decided to go with rubbish free lunches, but extend it beyond the children's school lunches and make it about Stu's work lunches and my lunches too.

The kids lunches turned out to be the easiest.  We were already using plastic sandwich boxes, small plastic "snack boxes" and reusable drink bottles for water.  The only tricky things here were that I had to make more items from scratch than I already was - no "lazy morning" chucking in of muesli bars any more.  And occasionally, I had to get creative with how to pack things - like muffins which were too big for the snack boxes (cut them in half and pack differently) and bread rolls the wrong shape for sandwich boxes (more about these in a minute).  We didn't worry about organic rubbish in lunches, so apple cores and banana peel wasn't a concern.  Our school also has a "heat up" day in which kids can take along something from home to be warmed in the pie oven or heated in the microwave.  Last year the boys took a LOT of cup noodles.  These got the flick this year to be replaced with homemade pies and leftovers.

I thought the adult lunches would be easy, but we learnt that we eat takeaway items more often than we thought!  Stu would often "not have time" or "forget" to make lunch in the past or I would be held up in town and then we would "have to" buy something - there is a lot of rubbish in a takeaway lunch (in more ways than one!).

So we got better with our remembering and always took at least a bottle of water and a snack, if not a whole lunch.  The other problem we came across was bread rolls. Stu and I, like lots of adults, like to have a bread roll stacked with salad, meat and cheese and we found that these wouldn't fit in a standard sandwich box, or if put into a larger box, would fall apart and be a mushy mess by lunchtime.  So I created roll wraps.  A washable fabric wrap for rolls that simply buttons around to hold it all together :)

Several months later..... we still don't use plastic wrap or other disposables in our lunches.  Although we will sometimes (maybe once a month) get a takeaway lunch, and when we have been really busy (like when we built the kitchen) the kids have had the odd muesli bar or similarly packaged snack.  But for the most part, we are still having rubbish free lunches - SUCCESS!  And, this green change, comes with bonus health and financial benefits :)