How to be a Winner at Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner: Reducing Consumption and Waste

Benjamin Rolland, 2016, personal photo

We all have to eat, and often times we have to do it against the clock. We pack our lunch and prepare our breakfast and dinner the day or night before, or even the morning of, so that we can chow them down when its time to eat our meals. We pack lunches for our children, and prepare items to-go if we're ever working in the field. We grab our coffee or tea in a disposable cup to drink down on our way to school, work, or wherever our day is taking us.

Benjamin Rolland, 2016, personal photo

Enter the waste-free meal. Reusable packaging allows you to ditch the foil and ziplock bags for something sturdy and environmentally-friendly. Getting a lunch box or personal cooler allows you to customize your carrier and to regulate your food's temperature. Having a reusable water bottle and coffee container also provides these benefits, and eliminates the extremely wasteful and even hazardous single-use plastic bottles and cups. Did you know they also sell foldable trays that help you portion your meals, or reusable straws and silverware to ditch those plastic utensils? There are so many ways to conserve regarding meal packaging, and even the food we decide to pack in it!

Benjamin Rolland, 2016, personal photo

Schools and work places can embrace a single-stream recycling system which eliminates the need to sort through waste on the user end and maximizes the amount of recycling done in an environment (Bell, 2016). Creating incentives and educational programs for people to bring reusable items, to minimize waste, and to promote composting also helps to keep environmental impact at a minimum (Bell, 2016).

The EPA has created a waste-reduction hierarchy to make waste management even easier. Beginning at the source of the product, they recommend buying: in bulk, using the least amount of plastic packaging, minimizing packaging toxicity and pollution, to minimize the environmental impact from the get go (EPA, 2017). By recycling and using efficient waste-disposal technology, you remove the need to create and use more products from environmental resources, reducing impact, promoting ecologically-friendly practices, and taking a load off of our waste management centers (EPA, 2017). Further, single-use plastic packaging may contain harmful toxins, like BPA (Bisphenol A) that enter our food or drinks through contact and heat, known to: "...mimic the body's own hormones potentially leading to a variety of health outcomes such a breast and prostate cancer, menstrual irregularities, genital abnormalities in male babies, infertility in men and women, early puberty in girls, and metabolic disorders such as skin disorders increasing neurobehavioral problems, obesity, type-2 diabetes, and immune system effects" (Priya, Toppo, Singh, Singh, & Sethia, 2016).

Those are some scary health effects that I'd prefer to avoid. Wouldn't you?

So ditch the single-use items and tell your school or work about implementing a more efficient recycling system to protect the environment. It's easy, it is environmentally-friendly, and it saves resources for your company and for manufacturers. It further promotes a sustainable culture which can make its way into all aspects of your community. Become the example for efficient and green living, and tell your story to your family, friends, and neighbors.

Let's ditch the single-use lifestyle and embrace a culture of reusable products!

Drstuey at the English Language Wikipedia, 2008, retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waste_hierarchy.svg, licensed for personal or commercial use