Back To School: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle
Sharpen those pencils, parents! Back To School shopping season is here already. Go easy on the planet this year and lower your environmental footprint this year with just a few simple, easy changes in what you buy.
We’ve teamed up with Schoola and Paper Culture to bring you some great tips to help you embrace the three r’s of green living—reduce, reuse, and recycle—to help you keep the planet, and your pockets, filled with green.
Reduce: Say Bye-Bye to the Brown Bag with ECOlunchbox
Fact: 100 million pieces of lunchtime trash are thrown away every hour, mostly from school lunch waste.
Though every small paper bag and Ziploc you use may not seem like such a big deal, don’t be fooled. Over time, these items add up to mountains of trash—4.6 billion tons in the US alone—that could make even Everest seem small. In fact, lunchtime trash And worse, plastics are full of chemicals that are anything but healthy.
ECO Tip: Ditch the disposable, single-use stuff and opt for durable lunch containers. Our Blue Water Bento line, which come in different styles and sizes and have leak-proof silicone lids, are great for sandwiches, snacks and salads, and our Tri Bento Trio is also a stylish, popular choice with kids and teens.
Reuse: Cute Clothes Meet a Good Cause with Schoola
Now that you know how to make lunchtime green and great, let’s look another blindingly wasteful slice of back-to-school shopping—the wardrobe.
Fact: Children ages 2-10 grow 2 ½ inches and 6 pounds a year, and after puberty, these rates more than double, so the need for new clothes is practically constant.
ECO Tip: Instead of turning to off-the-rack garments from your local box store, opt for a more environmentally and financially sustainable option like Schoola. Full of carefully curated, preloved fashion for kids and women, Schoola helps you get adorable new clothes without buying into the polluting, fast-fashion industry. Even better, Schoola also donates a large portion of their proceeds to schools.
Recycle: Products that Are Pretty Inside and Out with Paper Culture
Fact: Deforestation causes a staggering 20% of greenhouse gas emissions. Combine that with the fact that, over time, humans have destroyed 75% of the world’s forests. Mind boggling, isn’t it?
ECO Tip: Inventive companies like Paper Culture use 100% recycled materials and offer a wide range of necessary and useful items ranging from kid-friendly notecards perfect for writing welcome notes to teachers, to fun wall decals greats for kids heading off to college, to well-designed labels for all your organizational needs. Paper Culture’s products are both creative and eco-conscious, and they plant a tree with every order.
By helping to reduce greenhouse gases and deforestation with the wisely crafted (and superbly cute!) products, you’ll be able to send your kids to school with a clean conscious.
