Share and Voice: Meal Time Challenge

Ok, so I realize that spring break was ages ago, but I still want to share with you guys something cool that happened while I was on my trip. Over Spring Break this year, I went to Gulfport, Mississippi, to participate in a service trip doing hurricane relief for the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We did this service trip through PDA (Presbyterian Disaster Assistance). PDA has Volunteer Villages that people can stay in. They can hold up to 90 volunteers a week. Since they get so many people volunteering, they decided to do something about their excessive waste.

Their solution to this problem was simple, yet very beneficial. They asked us all to save our plastic cups that we used at every meal, and save our paper bags that we put our lunches in. This made a huge difference. Instead of me going through three plastic cups a day, I only needed to go through a couple during the entire week. The same thing happened with the paper bags. Instead of me using a different paper bag every day, I reused two for the whole week. The amount that I saved doesn’t really seem like a big deal; I saved roughly three paper bags, and roughly five or six plastic cups in that week. But now, take that amount of cups and bags saved, and multiply it by the 80 people who were there with me that week. That is a ton of waste that was saved. And even better, think about how many cups and paper bags PDA saves in a month, or even a year. This is amazing! I was so excited to hear that even though PDA is such a big organization, that they were still concerned about saving the environment.

Now I explained what we did that week…so lets talk about what we all can do to minimize our waste during the meal times.

• Silverwear: You can either use metal silverwear at your meals, or save the plastic silverwear that you get at the food court and reuse them the next time you eat.
• Napkins: If you take too many napkins when you go out to a restauraunt, take the extras home with you to use at your next meal.
• Lunch Bags: If you use paper bags to pack your lunch, reuse them until they rip. Or even better, invest in an insulated lunch box, that you can reuse for an extremely long time.
• Bring Your Own Food to School: The school must repackage everything in order to get them into personal servings. This produces a lot of waste.

Everything that I mentioned above will not only help in reducing waste, but it will also help you save some money; so why don't you try to help the environment and yourself out, and try to do one of the suggestions above to save waste.



To learn more about the organization that I volunteered through, you can go the the PDA website at: http://www.pcusa.org/pda/index.htm


You can also go to My Zero Waste and read the article, "How to pack a reduced waste lunch box". This article has a bunch of really cool suggestions.


Have a Great Day!!!