In the month of February, challenged by Hip Mountain Mama to make One Small Change, I declared Ziploc Elimination in my home. (In January I decided to break our reliance on paper towels. You can read about our month and my washie tutorial here.) THIS was a difficult challenge. We use Ziploc baggies all the time in a snack-on-the-go, freezer meal family. But to give it a try, this task required my sewing machine, a bit of cash, and quite a bit more effort that simply snatching one of those disposable, petro-baggies before hurrying out the door late for another engagement.

We use Ziploc baggies for so many things in our home. Organizing the junk drawer, storing linens, sorting toys and puzzles, and even keeping papers (stick your paper recipe card in a Ziploc, and it will never again get destroyed by spaghetti sauce splatter.) We store snacks, freeze meals, save dry foods, and sometimes marinate in Ziplocs. I know that the plastic against food isn’t the best, and the wasted plastic in the landfills is even worse, but cutting our dependence on these baggies is certainly the most difficult in the kitchen.

To begin to eliminate Ziploc bags in the kitchen I substituted sewn snack baggies for crackers, goldfish, and pretzels, and tried out Kids Konserve stainless steel snack containers for wet snacks like grapes.

Kids Konserve is a lovely brand of eco-friendly food saving products. I tried out their stainless steel snack containers with lids for kiddie snacks. The tops fit pretty tight so grapes didn’t leak and make a mess, though I wouldn’t recommend these for yogurt. The kids couldn’t get the tops off the containers without help. They are lightweight, but don’t dent easily. (My kids tried throwing them on the floor already.) They are dishwasher safe, but obviously don’t nuke these in the microwave. They are small enough for toddler portions, but for an adult, they’d most certainly leave you hungry.

The only complaint I have  about these petite, indestructible, cuties is that they are expensive. Three (3) of these little guys run you about $18 plus shipping and handling. Although they will probably last you a lifetime, we will probably lose these expensive snack containers in no-time. (These comments aren’t in anyway connected to Kids Konserve and are simply my opinions.)

I also stitched up a few snack sacks from cotton scraps and PUL fabric (polyurethane laminated fabric.) PUL is a unique laminated fabric that acts as a moisture barrier. Since I didn’t want the laminate to touch the food, I simply lined the pouch with another layer of 100% cotton fabric and stitched in a Velcro strip to close up the baggie. Just toss the sacks in the laundry when it needs a cleaning. These diminutive snack sacks measure about 4″X6″ and fit enough food for a rather large toddler snack like dried fruit, cereal, goldfish, cookies, crackers, pretzels, nuts, yogurt covered raisins, bagel chips, popcorn, trail mix … you get the idea. There are plenty of tutorial about how to make these around the blogosphere so I will not bore you with another one here. Go here, here, or here if you’d like to learn how to stitch your own.

Purchasing PUL is a bit tricky actually. It isn’t sold in retail stores that I know of, but there are Yahoo purchasing co-operatives like this one or this one that purchase colored and printed PUL fabrics regularly, but you must become a member to place an order. (Just a note, I already had PUL in my fabric stash before February. It would probably take you a few months, give or take a bit, to get that PUL order in hand.) And I think this site also sells PUL, though I haven’t purchased from this retailer personally. Additionally, PUL is not bio-degradable. But you can stick it in the laundry or simply wash it in the sink and use it again and again and prevent hundreds of Ziploc baggies from facing a forever-fate in our landfills.

Reusable containers required a bit more effort to launder and wash than simply grabbing another plastic bag out of the drawer, but we probably kept 50+ Ziploc bags out of our landfills in the month of February alone! Yes, you can wash and reuse Ziploc bags, but preschool teachers aren’t going put an empty plastic bag back in your toddler’s lunch box. But a stainless steel container in a toddler’s lunch tote isn’t going in the trash! Yeah for less trash!

If there had been a bit more time, and a bit more money, I might have tried out other Ziploc-substitutes for larger food storage like Pyrex. I tell you though, What do you put cheese in after you open that plastic vacu-pak wrap? A Ziploc? Saran-Wrap? Tupperware? making sure your food isn’t touching something plastic is quite a feat.Does anyone put their cheese in an earthenware dish with a clay top and stick that in their fridge? What do you do with toasted seaweed sheets after you open the plastic baggie? A Ziploc? Glad-Ware?  Why is everything packaged in plastic to begin with? This brings me to March’s challenge: responsible packaging consumption.

My one small change for March is to blog 20 days about packaging consumption. We all love snack-size convenience, but the environment doesn’t love snack-size packaging. We like Costco economy, but the environment doesn’t like plastic-shrink-wrapped jumbo sized packaging. Are there ways we can consume less plastic and paper packaging, cut down the amount of trash we toss out, and reduce the number of items we place in the recycle bin every day? Tune in for  20 days of discussion about how to purchase less packaging. Here is to a greener earth for everyone.

And, go to Hip Mountain Mama’s blog to take a peek at what others are doing to make One Small Change.