Honeybun’s school has instituted a new lunch program called “Waste Free Wednesdays.” The idea is to encourage families to pack lunches with reusable items. We are encouraged to put lunch in a reusable lunch box instead of using traditional paper bags and to put food in reusable containers rather than using plastic baggies. This is easy for us since we’ve been doing these things since the first day of school. I even send her water in a reusable cup rather than a juice box or having her buy milk and bought some plastic reusable silverware at Ikea for her lunches (see “Boxed Lunch”)
Each Wednesday that a child doesn’t have any trash in their lunch, they get a special reward (Honeybun couldn’t remember what she gets). Sounds easy enough, except the issue of yogurt. I’ve been giving Honeybun yogurt or cheese each day in the place of milk, usually in the form of a frozen yogurt tube. Per the “rules” of Waste Free Wednesday, there can be NO trash in a child’s lunch for them to get the reward.
This leaves me in a bit of a predicament as the frozen yogurt is thawed by lunch time but still cold, not frozen yogurt or cheese is probably not cold (or even cool) by lunch time. So today I put some regular yogurt in a reusable container for her and also an ice pack to try to keep the yogurt cold. And can you guess what I did with the yogurt container? I put it in the recycling which is better than the trash but now I am also stuck with an extra dirty container that will need water and chemicals to clean and it didn’t cut down on the actual trash at all, it just hid the trash from the school’s view.
I’m all for being more responsible with the environment and not being wasteful but it seems counterproductive to me to just keep the trash at home. Plus i’m sure the children who receive or buy school lunch a given milk or juice boxes, paper napkins and one time use plastic silverware. I love the idea but, as usual, am disappointed in the execution and wonder if the kids are really learning anything from the program.
