Green your back-to-school routine

 While I love my pink Barbie lunch purse, I’m not at all snooty about recycling bread wrappers and other odd plastic bags to pack inside. I’m saving pennies, but also the environment, and that makes me enjoy my meal. My college-age daughter enjoys an environmentally conscience lunch packing, too. When we were on a recent bike ride, she stopped to pick plastic drink can rings from the street. She cut them up so birds wouldn’t get tangled in them.

Jodi Helmer’s book “The Green Year” has daily tips for the kitchen and beyond. Today’s tip is using dry erase boards for shopping lists, etc. to save paper. Toxin-free ways to make your kitchen smell fresher include burning a beeswax candle, enjoying fresh flowers or hanging dried lavender or eucalyptus.

Families can learn a lot about each other by reading a dated page daily. I love the bottom, which has space for jotting down one’s own alternative and additional ideas. Here are a few from the book:

    * Pack a waste-free lunch: Over 10 billion yogurt cups and 3.6 billion drink pouches end up in the landfill every year. Try packing a waste-free lunch. Seal sandwiches in reusable containers, fill a thermos with soup and pack it all in a reusable lunch bag.

* Keep the oven door closed when making dinner. Each time you open it, the temperature drops 25 to 50 degrees.

* Scrape your dirty dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

* Buy recycled school supplies: Stock the kids’ backpacks with notebooks, binders, paper and printer cartridges made from recycled materials. Choose school supplies with as little packaging as possible (30 percent of the waste in our landfills comes from product packaging) and buy in bulk, if possible. Go through last year’s school supplies to see which items can be used again this year.



 Eat your greens

 If you hydrate while you mow, you can probably imagine the sensation of grass in your water. But lots of people add wheat grass on purpose. Or maybe it prefers to be called “green superfood.” Navitas Naturals makes it not bad at all with a convenient pouch from which you measure this powder of amino acids, live enzymes and chlorophyll. I was mesmerized by the rich color and flaky texture. It looks like soil from Emerald City or eye shadow for a super model. The taste is minimal in water, so I wouldn’t notice it at all in banana breakfast smoothies. Follow it up with the company’s antioxidant trail mix featuring three interesting berries, cacao nibs and cashews. My tasters loved tart goldenberries, mulberries and tiny, perky goji.

One more cool Navitas Naturals find: Cacao Power lip balm with natural stuff that packs a flavor. Seriously. There’s chocolate pound cake in the next office, but I’m eyeing my balm for a treat.

ddoiron@panews.com