5 Ways to Feed Your Family with Less Waste

(This guest post comes courtesy of Rubbermaid, whose products I used in my home but which did not pay me or supply any freebies in exchange for me running this guest post. I just genuinely liked the information after I saw a link on the Rubbermaid Twitter feed. I asked for permission to reprint the post here, and Rubbermaid gave me its blessing.)

By making a few easy (yes, easy!) adjustments to your on-the-go routine, you’ll not only save resources—you may save money, too. Here are five ways to feed your family with less waste overall.

1. Ban the juice box
Old habit: Passing a juice box to your kids in the back seat of the car.
New habit: Instead fill small reusable juice boxes or bottles with your kids’ favorite drinks from the fridge and take them with you. If every student at your child’s school did this, it would keep approximately 107,000 disposable juice boxes from heading to the landfill every school year. (We always send our girls to school or sports practices with reusable containers filled with water. When our girls were little, their juice boxes were the refillable Rubbermaid kind that we could use, then put in the dishwasher, then us again ad infintum.)

2. Bag your own snacks
Old habit: Putting prepackaged snack foods in children’s lunchboxes.
New habit: Make your own snack packs by dividing dry cereal, trail mix, cubed cheese, or sliced fruit among reusable single-serving containers. Not only do home-packed snacks reduce waste, they’re healthier than most convenience snacks, too. (They’re also cheaper! Yesterday, I packaged my daughters sandwiches in a reusable container. One of them wanted cantaloupe so she got it, cut up, in a reusable container with a fork from our silverware drawer.)

3. Break the bottled water habit
Old habit: Buying bottled water to drink at work or the gym.
New habit: Drinking lots of water is important indeed. Just keep a reusable water bottle at the office and in your gym bag for filling up at the water cooler or tap. (With our kitchen renovation almost done and the water line hooked up to our new refrigerator, we now have easy access to lots of ice and water, which makes filling our bottles that much easier–and colder.)

4. Freeze it!
Old habit: Tossing out Monday’s lasagna because you can’t face Day Three of leftovers.
New habit: Freeze leftovers in a durable food storage container. Then bring them to work for lunch in a week or two when when you’re excited, not bored with your home cooking. (Last night’s leftovers are waiting to be today’s lunch, thanks to the reusable container I have them stored in. No reason to throw out perfectly good–and free–food!)

5. B.Y.O.D.B. (bring your own doggie bag)
Old habit: Having a restaurant wrap up whatever you don’t finish to take home.
New habit: Carry compact reusable containers so you always have an instant doggie bag when you need one. (This is a concept I’d never considered. How fun and something I’ll have to try the next time I treat myself to a dinner out.)

Tags: Rubbermaid