by Maria Pilar Clark

Believe it or not, children's lunches create more than 3.5 billion pounds of garbage each year, which amounts to an astounding 18,760 pounds of trash annually from an average sized elementary school, and that's not even counting the extra goodies your kids sneak in when they think you're not looking.

Reducing the volume of products our families use on a daily basis is imperative to reverse, or at least reduce, the impact our waste is having on the environment since reusing can save more than just the material it takes to make a product, including the embedded energy that follows it from early mining stages to final manufacture.

Kids Konserve choosing to reuse easy with its own take on the brown paper bag: a Signature Reusable Waste-Free Lunch Kit that includes a mod patterned cotton sack, two food grade, non-leaching stainless steel food containers, a stainless steel beverage bottle, food kozy (it's green version of the plastic baggie,) one cloth napkin and a recycled aluminum name tag.

Considering it takes one tree a long fifteen years to grow before it can be cut down in mere minutes to produce just 700 brown paper bags, that's some serious food for thought.