greenspree.ca at The Sietch

Over the last year my wife and I have been trying to overcome a serious and expensive habit. Eating out for lunch! We moved from a downtown apartment two blocks from our work to her folks place 26km from town. Before we would simply walk home for lunch, get something from the fridge, eat and head back to the office. No longer having that convenient option available to us we had gotten into the habit of meeting for lunch somewhere and paying 15-20 a day!

This had to stop so we decided we would start bringing our lunches to work. At first we would bring sandwiches in baggies, instant soup in disposable bowls, yogurt in disposable cups, some fruit or sometime veggies in another baggie and put them in a grocery bag. This inevitably led to much cost savings but much more waste. Our meal may have only cost us $4 but we were throwing out two containers, a baggie or two, grocery bag and whatever compost was left over. We started getting irritated at this and decided to look for solutions.

More after the fold.

We buy different types of bread all the time for our sandwiches and I wasn’t sure that a sandwich container was the way to go. Plus I didn’t like buying more plastic things that will eventually get lost or thrown out. One day I tried wrapping my sandwich in waxed paper, it worked beautifully with a small piece of tape to hold the folded flaps in place! Now I know wax paper is covered in paraffin, a hydrocarbon, but until I find a suitable reusable sandwich container a 12″x12″ square of waxed paper beats a sandsich baggie or saran wrap anyday!

For soups we started making our own and found these great little 2 cup glass bowls with sealable lids. I have even started making miso soup by spooning some miso paste into the bowl from the freezer, adding shopped onion, mushroom, seaweed and even tofu and then adding hot water to it at lunch time, simple and tastes great!

For things like yougurt and dressing and veggies, resealable plastic or glass containers are used again and we started bringing everything in our cloth shopping bags. This also has the added benefit of ensuring we always have at least two cloth bags in the car on the way hom from work when unplanned shopping trips at the grocery store come up.

The sum total has been to go from 5 pieces of garbage and some compost every lunch to a piece of wax paper (which is compost in our jurisdiction) and the same amount of compost. They are really minor changes to and have a huge impact in the run of a year! Our waste reduction will go one step further when our 400sqft veggie garden starts supplying our fresh veggie snacks eliminating packaging from the store that would normally be associted with them. I also plan on looking into homemade soup dehydration/condensing to do away with buying ready made soup for lunches and camping trips.

I hope more people start looking at there lunch habits (and every other area of their lives) and recognize the amount of waste being thrown out to accomodate one meal. That waste is not only an issue in terms of disposal, but it took resources and energy to produce it, energy to ship it and in the case of recyclables, energy to render it back into a resource. Cutting it out completely is the best option, even over recycling!