Bringing Lunchbox Back

When did lunch boxes become so rare? Maybe it stems from my Navy brat youth in Japan, where bento boxes reign supreme, but my mother was packing my school snacks in a tupperware-filled lunch box decades before I’d ever even heard the phrase “reusable bag.” The lunch box seems to have lost its clout here in the US, though — disposable paper lunch sacks just make everything so much less work — leading some schools to make bold moves to pick up the slack.

Students at Marshall Elementary School on the former Fort Ord reduced their lunch waste by half last year in the Waste Free Schools pilot program, organized by the MRWMD and modeled on a successful program in Santa Cruz.

“It’s been estimated that a student can generate 67 pounds of lunch-related waste per year,” notes Kimberle Herring, public education coordinator for the Monterey Regional Waste Management District. And that adds up.

“We provided education for students and staff, and in six weeks reduced the lunch waste by 50 percent,” said Herring. “We also were successful in promoting a Zero Waste Lunch Challenge — causing families to become more aware in general about waste generation, and specifically in encouraging waste free or lighter lunches.”

Oh hey, Marshall Elementary! I was there for a semester of fifth grade, when it really was still Fort Ord. Anyway, tangents aside, the school aims to make life a little better overall with the zero waste initiative, not just for its students and families, but for itself.

Not only was this good for the Earth, but for the school’s bottom line. Less garbage means reduced disposal costs, saving the school more than $4,600 annually.

“A typical size school in our area can generate 21,440 to 97,485 pounds of waste per year,” says Herring.

Intense! Schools are pretty wasteful, it seems. Much of the rest of the article is devoted to giving mothers and fathers good ideas on how to pack a lunch with waste reduction on their minds, here in the day and age of disposable heaven. What about you, though? As a child, did you bring your lunches to school in a paper bag or a lunch box? How have things changed for you now, and why do you think that is? Is it just the advent of easiness? At least people are starting to realize, apparently, that easy is not always better.

Photo via Flickr!

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.