Green Gal-How to green up your brown bag.

Another repost from my sister. Very interesting. Please read

Green Gal-How to green up your brown bag.

As you guys all know I have a child that goes to public school. My Noah is autistic and so I go to his school to help him with lunch every single day. I sit and watch as HUGE trash bag after HUGE trash bag gets filled, tied and tossed. At least 10 of them EVERY DAY!! I hated the thought of all of the trash just being tossed after one use. I started to look up ways to lower my foot print in that department and I found some great products.

There are a lot of cool things out there, but because I am trying to make this as easy as possible so maybe others will consider doing it I will give you one web site to check out.www. reusablebags. com This is one of my favorite sites out right now. I talked about it in my last blog. Not only do they have lots of choices for ditching your plastic bag they have a ton of great choices for those of us that want to clean up our kids (or our own) lunches for not only the environment, but also for their (our) safety.

Some of my favorite products they have are the Wrap-n-Mat, the Happy Sacks, and the Laptop Lunches (all of which have their own websites). The Wrap-n-Mat is a sandwich holder that is safe, reusable and opens up to be a place mat you can eat on. The Happy sacks replace thousands of Ziploc bags as they hold your snacks (cookies, crackers, ect.) over and over again. Laptop lunches are a complete set of reusable containers, plus you can get a guide on healthy ways to fill all of those containers. All of these options come in lots of great colors and designs too. I have also made the choice to go with reusable napkins as well, which you can also find on this site. I of course would also recommend a reusable water bottle. They have those on this site as well, but that will be my next blog... so we won't go too much more into that.

If you want some reasons why you might want to consider switching to these wonderful options; here are some facts for you to mull over.

1. Childrens lunches create 3.5 billion pounds of garbage EACH YEAR. That is not counting every adult who might also bring a lunch from home to work.

2. 18,760 pounds of trash is generated annually from one average elementary school.

3. It takes a 15 year old tree to produce 700 brown lunch bags.

4. These reusable products are made from FDA approved, non-toxic, non-leaching, polyethylene plastic or PEVA and are 100% BPA-free. What you are using now is probably not.

I feel so much better when my child gets to walk out the doors of the cafeteria while not adding a thing to the multiple trash cans lined up by them. I hope you might try some of these products your self not only for the benefit of the environment and your health, but your wallet as well. Wouldn't it be nice to never have to buy boxes of zip locks, bottles of water or rolls of paper towels for lunches anymore? It cost more upfront, but you make it up in the end.Plus you can't buy the way being green makes you feel!