Sustainable Sack Lunch

A sack lunch sandwich can be packaged in a variety of ways: aluminum foil, a ziptop baggie or a plastic sandwich box. The energy required to make these containers differs depending upon the material type and the amount of recycled fibers used.

Generally, when packing lunches using aluminum foil or baggies, new foil or a new baggie is used every day. By comparison, plastic sandwich boxes can be reused repeatedly. When a sandwich is packaged in a plastic sandwich box instead of aluminum foil or plastic baggies, over 80% of the energy used for sandwich containers is saved. This can lead to big savings over the course of a school year. There are approximately 185 days in a school year. If one studnet's sandwich for lunch is packed in a plastic box instead of a siptop baggie, the family saves $15 on sandwich wrappers, since one plastic box can be used all year.

There were 165,375 students in the 1990-91 first grade class in Florida. If the sandwich for each student was packaged in a plastic sandwich box for the school year instaed of baggies, the equivalent to over 125,000 gallons of gasoline would be saved annually. The energy in 125 thousand gallons of gasoline coulnd run a stereo for more than 19 million hours. Nineteen million hours is 2,231 years of continuous stereo sound.

--University of Florida, Cooperative Extension Service, Fact Sheet EES-77