Why your lunch is bad for the planet

The purpose of convenience items is to save resources like time and energy. It seems like everything is disposable these days. Paper plates, paper towels, plastic cups, platstic utensils and that's just your lunch! If not recycled all of these items end up in landfills. Convenience is a short term benefit with a devastating impact.


Consider these not so fun facts about school lunch in America:

Close to 2.7 billion juice boxes end up in landfills every year. (Container Recycling Institute)

Each child who brings a brown-bag lunch to school every day will generate 67 pounds of waste by the end of the school year - that's 18,760 pounds of lunch waste for an average-sized school! (EPA)

According to the 2004 U.S. Census data, there are 36.4 million elementary school-age children and 16.8 million high school-age children. If every child adopted a waste-free lunch (including finishing all of their food), we could divert more than 3.5 billion pounds of trash from our landfills each year.

Each year the U.S. consumes over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps. (EPA)

Lunchtime trash is second only to office paper as the leading source of school waste. (Green Teacher Magazine, Fall 2004)

A disposable lunch costs $4.02 per day, versus $2.65 for a waste-free lunch. That translates to a savings of about $246.60 per child per year. wastefreelunches.org




Here is the challenge: Give up some of your precious time and energy and inconvenience yourself for the sake of the planet. Opt for reuseable products and skip the disposables.