Litter Free Lunches
Jeanne Anderson - March 29, 2021
Each Friday the Kaitiakitanga values leaders will be handing out Kaitiakitanga tickets to those children who have litter free lunches. These tickets then go into a prize draw. One name per team will be drawn out each Friday. While we are promoting Litter Free lunches on a Friday we would like to aim for Merrin School to have Litter Free lunches every day.
Sadly food designed for lunchboxes like muesli bars, chips, yogurt, dried fruit etc, all tend to come in convenient single-use packets because the food companies know that parents are often looking for the option that's going to save them time, rather than money. Unfortunately, this means that a huge amount of rubbish is heading to landfills from school lunchboxes.
We are asking that wrappers or packets are removed before the food gets packed into the lunchbox and disposed of or recycled at home. Doing this step before the lunchbox comes to school, as opposed to being done at the end of the day would help us limit the stray rubbish around Merrin significantly!
There are various options for how this can be done such as:
* Bento style lunch boxes that have separate compartments
* Reusable containers from home that fit in bigger lunch boxes
* Reusable Beeswax food wraps
We appreciate your support and help in maintaining Merrin School being Litter Free.
Here are some useful links for ideas of to how to pack a Litter Free lunch.
https://www.treehugger.com/how-pack-litter-free-school-lunch-4856164
https://wholefully.com/zero-waste-school-lunches/
https://www.superhealthykids.com/healthy-home/top-10-waste-free-lunch-tips/