The 3 R's - Reduce, Reuse & Recycle

I'll admit that my very first thoughts when considering to develop our product was to be able to fill a pouch with my own food and save money but as the idea took seed so did my awareness of the environmental impact of waste. Developing our Reusable Food Pouch has encouraged me to look at  many other parts of our lives that we can implement the 3 R's.

REDUCE

I feel really good that we haven't bought a pre-filled food pouch for over 6 months now.  In that 6 months I would have thrown away around 350 empty pouch packets! That's based on having 2 toddlers and each one having 1 pouch a day which is to be honest quite a conservative estimate. It doesn't bear thinking about how many get thrown away across the world! I love the fact that I have eliminated that waste from our life.

We have also managed to reduce the amount of wasted fruit and vegetables we have each week. Any brown bananas get skinned and put in the freezer or blended before they have chance to go completely off. The little leftover bits of banana that my children reject after they have eaten enough now get frozen or blended immediately. I now buy more fruit than ever before but all of it gets used up or stored for future use. It feels great not throwing away food each week.

REUSE

Obviously I reuse my Nom Nom Kids pouches on a daily basis. Despite using my pouches very frequently I haven't had to throw any away! I am really proud of that as they do get put through there paces with 2 toddlers around and I take them out to baby fairs and local groups regularly.

We reuse cotton bags when shopping and I am even going to take up a challenge set by The Rubbish diet to get my meat at the butchers packed into a reusable container rather than wrapped in a plastic bag.

We use reusable containers or wrappers for food as much as we possibly can rather than using cling foil or disposable bags. There are some fantastic divided lunch boxes around that have an air tight seal so you no longer need to wrap everything individually for lunch.  Check out Yumbox UK these fantastic bento style lunch boxes are available soon and we can't wait to get one.

I'd love to say that we use reusable nappies, we did for a while but stopped after a very bad stomach bug. Let's not get into details! I do wish that I had persevered though.

RECYCLE

We are recycling more than ever now. Everything that can get recycled does get recycled in our house now from paper, plastics, and tetra packs to clothing. It's a shame that our local authority don't do kerbside collections for all items but we make the effort to take everything else to the recycling center.

Do you go even further than this? what else have you reduced, reused and recycled? Do you have some good tips for others? There's so much that we can do to minimise the impact of waste on our planet and small savings made by the masses can make an amazing difference.