The Mom and the Eco-friendly Lunchbox

Take, for exam­ple, the mom who became con­sci­en­tious about the amount of plas­tic she was con­sum­ing and throw­ing away just pack­ing daily lunches for her two chil­dren. Not only was dis­card­ing plas­tics an issue, but she had also become informed about chem­i­cal com­pounds such as bisphe­nol A (BPA), a chem­i­cal linked to hor­mone dis­rup­tion that is used in the man­u­fac­ture of var­i­ous plas­tic con­tain­ers and has been found in sev­eral stud­ies to leach into food from those containers.

“I have two lit­tle kids, and I just wasn’t find­ing what I wanted in terms of lunch solu­tions,” Sandra Ann Harris, founder of ECOlunchbox, told Organic Connections. “It seemed like every­thing was plas­tic and throw­aways, and every day I would pack up a lunch and I just wasn’t feel­ing good about how I was pack­ing it—both from an envi­ron­men­tal stand­point and from a health stand­point. So I started to hunt down lunch solu­tions that I thought would work well for my kids.”

In her search, Sandra also took into con­sid­er­a­tion the need for the con­tain­ers to be able to be eas­ily opened and closed by chil­dren. She had dis­cov­ered that some of the tougher plas­tic con­tain­ers would have to be opened by teach­ers, who couldn’t nec­es­sar­ily make it to each and every child to help them. Hence, some food wouldn’t even be eaten and would arrive back home at the end of the day.

Ultimately, she could find noth­ing to sat­isfy her search, so she came up with a lunch-kit solu­tion her­self. It con­sists of a 100 per­cent cot­ton, machine-washable bag; inside are cloth nap­kins match­ing the bag and reusable bam­boo uten­sils, along with a stainless-steel food container.

Sandra observed that she wasn’t the only one with this problem—it was poten­tially an issue for par­ents every­where. So, she decided to go ahead and mar­ket the ECOlunchbox as a product.

It took some per­se­ver­ance. “My back­ground is in jour­nal­ism and non-profit orga­ni­za­tions, so I had lit­tle to no expe­ri­ence to help me in cre­at­ing a retail prod­uct,” Sandra related. “In fact, I had the con­cept for years before I actu­ally started the com­pany because I thought it would be too hard. I had no idea how to approach prod­uct devel­op­ment, how to source it, how to mar­ket it, how to place it in stores—I didn’t know any­thing about all of that. But my jour­nal­ism back­ground did pre­pare me for one thing: to not be shy about ask­ing the right ques­tions. That actu­ally proved to be pretty help­ful. In the end I did that and just fig­ured it out.”

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

Sandra designed the bag her­self, going through numer­ous pro­to­types. She knew she had to come up with some­thing that would work for both boys and girls. The uni­sex design she arrived at is more or less like a tra­di­tional lunch bag, but it can be worn as a back­pack, car­ried like a bag, or strapped to the hip. And it is avail­able in many dif­fer­ent prints to sat­isfy a broad spec­trum of tastes.

When Sandra actu­ally got into pro­duc­tion, she turned to a friend with a Fulbright Scholarship who was study­ing tex­tiles in India. The friend was able to con­nect her with tra­di­tional Indian block print­ers as well as with a shop in Mumbai that could sew the bags together for her. She was then able to find other sources for the bam­boo uten­sils and the steel boxes, which come in sev­eral dif­fer­ent sizes and shapes.

And the busi­ness has taken off! ECOlunchboxes are sold both as com­plete kits and as “a la carte” indi­vid­ual items. The full kits and their com­po­nents are cur­rently avail­able through many small nat­ural food out­lets across the coun­try, and of course from the ECOlunchbox website.

“ECOlunchboxes help to address a few of the risks that we’re fac­ing today,” Sandra con­cluded. “Are we going to save the world through mak­ing kids’ lunches eco-friendly? Probably not, but we can def­i­nitely decrease the num­ber of toxic risks to our children’s bodies.”

Something to think about for any of us who might be sit­ting on good ideas!

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit the ECOlunchbox web­site at www.ECOlunchboxes.com.