School Lunch & Plastics
Back to school is synonymous with packing lunches every day and one of the major dilemmas that parents face when it comes to lunch is plastics. Plastic lunch boxes, plastic snack and sandwich bags, plastic water bottles and plastic straws. At Second Chance Toys, we want to continue helping families move away from using so much plastic for food and water storage for kid’s lunches. Although we know plastics are cheap, lightweight, and easily replaceable, we also know that plastics can leach toxic materials into our kid’s lunches and have potential disastrous health affects years down the road. Let’s do our part to minimize plastics!
We are not contracted or aligned to any of the products we are about to mention. These products just seem like common sense and good quality when it comes to preparing school lunches and keeping our growing children healthy.
Let’s start with the lunchbox. One great choice for your little ones is the Kids Konserve Whimsy Snak Pack this lunch kit is BPA, lead, and phthalate-free, not to mention it’s really cute! It comes with a lunch bag that has a reusable sandwich bag and two reusable mini-stainless steel containers inside. Although they have plastic lids, being BPA, lead, and phthalate-free makes this an acceptable choice. If your child has a bigger appetite and needs more food storage, you can also purchase an additional set of mini-stainless steel containers, like this.
It may be a little pricey when you add it all up but you can be guaranteed that these will last the whole school year and beyond. Stainless steel presents a great replacement opportunity since it does not leach into food and is much lighter than using the glass containers sold at department stores. At home, we always use glass containers but when I sent my kids to school with them, they came home and told me the school banned glass.
Onward!
Next, the young-ins need something to store a drink for lunch and maybe during class. Many of us have gone down the path of buying hundreds of juice boxes, only to realize that they end up in landfills and the contents aren’t always the best for our kids. They also can be quite pricey if you buy the better quality juices and drinks. If you want to save money, protect your kids health, and help clean up our environment, the best thing you can do is buy a stainless steel bottle, one for regular water they can sip during the day and one for either milk, nondairy drinks, or juice. If you really want to get fancy, you can buy one that is stainless steel and keeps the temperature of the contents. Drinks stay cool and soup or leftovers stay hot.
We like the Kids Konserve 12-Ounce Stainless Steel Insulated Food Jar for hot foods.
We also like the Thermos Tritan 12 Ounce Hydration Bottle (and it’s Superman design) for our boys and the Thermos Funtainer Bottle (Hello Kitty design) for our girls.
You can check out Amazon.com and tell us which ones you like! Also, if you like these types of blog posts, please let us know. We’d love to share more. Happy Back to School!
Author: Kelly Eisenhardt, SCT Board Member & Environmental Professional
