Back-to-School Cool

Red and gold are the colors most commonly associated with fall, but it's easy to make back-to-school season a green one for your kids. From school supplies to lunches to special gifts, you can find cool alternatives that reduce waste and lessen toxic exposures:

• 3.4 million tons of paper are purchased during back-to-school season. If every student used 100 percent recycled paper--available now at Staples and most other major retailers--we could save millions of trees.
• More than 14 billion pencils are produced every year--enough to circle the globe 62 times. Consider buying refillable pencils that can be used for years, or EarthWrite recycled pencils.
• Making lunches for school every day creates an average of 67 pounds of garbage per child--or more than 18,000 pounds per school--each year. Reduce waste (and save money) by avoiding disposable packaging and single-serving items. Instead, buy foods in bulk and portion them out in reusable bags and containers.
• Go organic for lunch. It's not only healthier for your child, it's better for the planet.
• Plastic containers can leach toxins into kids' drinks, so look for a reusable metal bottle like the hip ones from Sigg or Klean Kanteen. If you do pick plastic, opt for safer plastics #1, 2, 4, and 5.
• Buy a backpack that's PVC-free, which means not made out of vinyl, or better yet, one made from recycled materials (check out Earthpak, REI, or Rewarestore.com). Another thing to look for is a lifetime guarantee, so if your kids' pack needs fixing, you can send it back for repair instead of buying a new one.
• For the gadget-loving older student, a solar-powered cell-phone charger comes in different fun colors and makes a great back-to-school gift. Solar-powered chargers also work for iPods, game players, and digital cameras. (Your college-bound kid not so into gizmos? We've got plenty of other great gift ideas.
• It's never too early to teach kids that re-using is important and fun. Have them figure out the amount of money that can be saved by re-using last year's supplies, and use some of that cash to take them out for ice cream or another treat.

Comments

[Carrie]

From Sierra Club:
In "Hazards of Hydration" (November/December 2003), we cited a study about single-use water bottles that appears to have been flawed. While reusing these #1 PET bottles is not a good idea because of risk of bacterial contamination, you probably don't need to worry about them releasing the chemical DEHA. The article has been corrected.
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/corrections/

[lem]

As bad as the tiniest event horizon sucking everything into a black hole, there exists a cloud of junk used as incentives for school kids purchased from the likes of Oriental Trading and such ilk by teachers. How is it that teachers are often the worst perpatrators of useless junk?

[Beth Kennedy Jones]

Hi

Do you have a friendly two or three liner that can be placed on the bottom of school info encouraging the community to go green. We work to use paperless communication, not always possible with some of our students, but either e-mailed generated or on paper flyers we would like to have a consistent reminder to the community that we are working to go green.

[Green Life Host]

Beth - Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you're asking for. If you were doing paper flyers, you could say something like "Please recycle this flyer and help the [name of your school district] in its efforts to go green." On email announcements, you could add something like "[Name of your school district] is trying to go green. Please consider the environment before printing this email." You could even add a specific fact about some ecofriendly change the district has made lately. Good luck!

In re: to Carrie's comment, the online version of the Sierra article about bottled water is accurate, as the original reference to DEHA concerns about #1 bottles has been removed. Bottles labeled #7 are still potential sources of BPA, making reusable metal bottles a better choice for schoolkids or anyone.