Health and Sustainability in the Kitchen Post #4

There's a lot going on in this pic, but I think it all fits under the same umbrella. ⛱️
Starting from the bottom and foreground, we have the sandwich wrappers and snack bags. The sandwich wraps are so great because, as you can can see, they open up and make a placemat. They wipe clean pretty easily. Yes, they do have some plastic on them, but use the rule of cool and you're good. I have several different kinds of snack bags - no strong preference - they all get thrown in the washing machine. Some people are big fans of bento boxes, and I'm all for that, but sometimes you just need a bag. The main benefit of these guys is obviously avoiding the use of ziplock bags, which are designed to be used once and discarded (though, I have been known to wash, dry, remove ziplock and recycle with other plastic bags at the grocery store).
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In the middle of the picture is a green triangle and a blue-green ball. These are quesadillas and a 1/2 eaten apple wrapped in my new Etee wraps. These guys replace plastic wrap or foil and work great! They wash up easily and are compostable when they are no longer useful. I definitely need more of them! 

Speaking of plastic wrap, the round guy in the back right of the picture is what we use in the microwave instead of wrapping stuff with plastic wrap. It is made of plastic, so you need to be careful that your food is not touching it. It's main benefit is keeping your microwave clean without producing more single-use plastic garbage. 
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Lastly, I've got a bag of lentils and a bag of shredded cheese. It's true, they are in ziplock bags, which is not ideal. I'm open to hearing about alternatives here! We shred blocks of cheddar and mozzarella because it's cheaper and also because they put additives in the pre-shredded stuff to keep it from going bad to quickly. Who needs that?! We buy dried beans and batch-soak them. After rinsing and draining them, we put them on a cookie sheet in the freezer. Once frozen, we put them in freezer bags. The benefits here are avoiding BPA-lined cans, saving money, and making it easy to use what we want and store the rest.​