EARTH DAY 2009

SF Bay Area Business Offers Unique Green Lunch Solutions!

How ECO is your lunchbox? On the eve of Earth Day, ECOlunchboxes.com is challenging people everywhere to ask this important question. At ECOlunchboxes.com, we believe that lunch by lunch we can green the world a whole bunch.

Making changes in our lunch habits, such as reducing our dependence on plastic/vinyl/insulated lunchboxes, other non-biodegradable lunch packaging and throw-aways, is an easy first step toward more sustainable lunching, says Sandra Harris, president of ECOlunchboxes.com, a new San Francisco Bay Area green business.

“I was so tired of our family’s over-reliance on leaching plastics and other synthetics,” Harris explains. “But when I hunted around for more natural, sustainable lunch packing solutions, I just wasn’t finding much. I started ECOlunchboxes.com so people could choose to pack their lunches in a way that’s healthy for people and the planet. It’s a win-win.”

Harris has designed the unique “ECOlunchbag + 3 Matching Napkins” for children and adults. The brightly colored handmade bags echo the shape of the typical kraft paper lunchbags used for generations, but they’re made out of 100% cotton and have a unique strapping system. The strap can be adjusted to fit anyone 3 to 103 and carried in a variety of styles, such as a backpack, a purse, a sling bag or a hip bag.

“It took me awhile to come up with a design that would machine wash really well and not look like a purse, because I wanted girls and boys, women and men to feel comfortable using it” explains Harris, a mother of two elementary-age children. “After sewing a bunch of prototypes, I came up with this unique design. My daughter loves using it like a purse. My son carries it like a backpack, and my husband throws it over his shoulder sling-bag style.”

The 100% cotton ECOlunchbag is the result of a people-to-people trade project ECOlunchboxes.com has started with artisans in India . It’s 100% sweatshop-free and sewn from hand-blocked-printed fabrics. ECOlunchboxes.com is based in Lafayette , Calif.

Waste-Free Lunch Facts

The best way to reduce garbage is to not create it. A waste-free lunch (sometimes called a litter-less, smart, garbage-less, waste-free, no-garbage or waste-not lunch) means that you have no packaging to throw away when you're done. All you’re left with is apple cores, banana peels and other biodegradable extras.

LUNCH WASTE
A typical American school kid generates 67 pounds of discarded lunchbox packaging waste per school year. That’s more than 18,000 pounds annually for an average-size elementary school, which adds up nationwide to more than 1 billion pounds annually.

ALUMINUM FOIL
More than 20 million Hershey's kisses are wrapped with 133 square miles of foil every day.

ALUMINUM AND TIN CANS
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, more than 50,000 12-oz. aluminum cans were made.

CHERRY PITS & BANANA PEELS
Food debris in a landfill decompose only 25% in the first 15 years (how about composting instead?).

JUICE BOXES
Most inorganic trash retains its weight, volume, and form for at least four decades.

PAPER BAGS AND NAPKINS
It is estimated that 17 trees are cut down for every ton of non-recycled paper.

PLASTIC BOTTLES
Nationwide, U.S. citizens discard 2-1/2 million plastic bottles every hour.

STYROFOAM
Nationwide, U.S. citizens throw away 25 billion styrofoam cups every year.

Sources: The Environmental Forum of Marin, Obentec & U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

For more information email or call 510-435-6499. ECOlunchboxes.com will be participating in a Lamorinda Earth Day event as well as demonstrating the product at a local store. Call for dates/times.