"Green" Your Kids' Lunches!

Today is St. Patty's day, and while I don't have anything to post related to shamrocks or green beer, I am going another route and posting something that is "green" in another sense of the word...



What do you think this contraption is? A scalp massager? A rocket launcher? Nope...it's a plastic bag dryer! Designed by Gary Poolman, this product concept is the winner of Axion Polymer's green product design competition. It is designed to help dry plastic sandwich bags after they've been washed, so they can be re-used. While Axion is optimistic about this product reaching a potential market of 6 million, I'm not quite so sure that many people would go through the trouble of washing bags that are designed to be used once and tossed away. I do sometimes re-use ziploc bags for dry snack foods when I'm re-filling them with the same thing, which works well when you're toting around dry cereal or goldfish crackers for your kids. I could see myself maybe using this to dry the bags that I use in my vacuum sealer...those at least are durable enough and designed to be washed and re-used.

Of course, you can always just not use the plastic bags and make or purchase your own re-useable food storage solutions.

Here's a tutorial for making your own super cute fabric, re-useable lunch bag by Purlbee:


Snack Taxi makes some really cute reuseable pouches for snacks and sandwiches:


Or, you can go all out with this cool waste-free lunch kit from Kids Konserve:


When I was little I remember feeling like an outcast using my insulated lunch bags and boxes, even though they had my favorite character Garfield on them...just because everyone else used those throw-away paper bags. I think this lunch kit is pretty sweet though...I'm curious how kids feel about using things like this today, being that "going green" is so "in" these days! I'll definitely be revisiting some of these products once my boys get old enough to go to school and bring lunches!