Business Opportunities Weblog

Niche Biz: Trash-Free Lunch Boxes

By on February 21, 2013 in Ideas

For people who want to offer their children a better selection of food at school, there is the traditional lunch box. Although it helps parents decide the best meal for their child, it does not help the environment. Between juice containers, ziplock bags, napkins, and plastic utensils, we are contributing tons of trash to landfills needlessly.

Kim Castner noticed the problem when it came to sending lunch to school with her own children. She tried a variety of ways to reduce the amount of waste with each lunch, but it just didn’t seem to do the job. Kim went to work and created her own solution, the Go Green Lunch Box, reports Manhattan Beach Patch.

Patch: So you thought to create your own lunchbox?

Castner: Well, we found one that may have been a solution, but my older daughter refused to carry it because it was so ugly. And the pieces were still getting lost. I just thought, ‘Gosh, there has got to be a way to do this. One lid, 5 sections for fruit, cookies and other things.’ So I started calling around to plastic companies. I quickly learned that to get someone to sketch this and build a mold, it was going to cost $75 for me to sell. That wasn’t going to work.

Patch: Has the lunchbox been well received in the community?

Castner: The schools save money on trash pick up. Grandview cut their trash substantially, I think it was from 25 bags a day to 4 bags a day. Waste Management [comes less] often. It all trickles down. From trash bag liners to paying the trucks, to saving on emissions from the trash trucks, everybody wins.

Patch: What makes your lunch box worth the extra money?

Castner: The biggest “aha” was the white board on the back. That’s the “I’ve got to have it” feature. I’ve never seen another product with that.

Photo from Go Green Lunch Boxes

lunch mompreneur

Angela Shupe has added 5,783 posts to Business Opportunities Weblog.

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  • http://n.a. Cindy Hawkins

    I am a passionate advocate of anything that stems our unending river of paper and plastic waste. Living here in NY, we probably hold the title for Most Flotsam Churned Out Anywhere in the U.S.: Every day I see TONS of stuff like this: plastic utensils, meal trays, discarded plastic containers – juice, milk and soda bottles. Yuk. Any item that deals with the amount thrown away and handles it purposefully, within the system should be hailed as a blessing. And more publicity is needed for things such as these, so that decision makers learn about them and, they can be put to use, routinely made a part of an overall ‘waste reduction’ program – in schools, companies, day care facilities, senior centers, wherever!

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