Green Highlands

How can our family eat dinner outside and make it zero waste, and easy to do?

A Highlands parent recently shared with me about how great and simple it is to eat family dinners outside. She has set it up so that it is even easier to have dinner (before dusk and the mosquitos descend), by doing a little prep work ahead of time. She has a water cooler outside and always on tap, with a stack of reusable cups. She just leaves that outside most days and that limits the kids and company from coming in for the water breaks before heading back out to the fun. Then she serves dinner family style and has a stack of little plates that she calls dining “tapas style.”

At dinner time, they bring out just one large serving tray, this night it was salmon, brown rice and steamed broccoli, and a large serving spoon, little plates and forks and the beverage (water), is already out there. She commented that her kids liked serving themselves and with the smaller plates, everyone ate a healthy portion. They committed to cloth napkins which if not dirty, she reuses and line dries.

If she has Gary Vierkant for her garbage service, then she will just put her food scraps in their organics recycling or in containers for leftovers.

Voila! An easy and enjoyable zero waste outdoors, dining al fresco!

The United Nations has coined today World Environment Day. Each and every person will need to make individual change for us to turn the proverbial bus around.

At Highlands school, collective change is being made for a more carbon neutral school footprint. For this civilization to neutralize the current state of climate unsustainability, everyone has got to change something. Here are a few ideas…

A great way to help the environment is to shake up your transportation routine. Try another and cleaner form of getting the kids to school, once a week? Once a month? Getting to school is a big area of greening that Highlands has room to improve upon. It is hard because we have just one entrance and exit for buses, cars, bikers, and walkers. Sometimes driving is the only option but, can you get your kids to school in a more eco-friendly manner?

Walk, bus, bike, organize an occasional group walk or bike. If you drive, please turn off your engine and don’t idle.

I biked with my 3 children last week to school, and it was rather dicey to say the least. Granted, it was me and child number 1 attached to a tag-a-long, and then child number 2 attached to the burley being pulled by the tag-a-long, and me on the bike. We looked like a locomotive. Child number 3 was biking behind our train-sized, biking system (and trying to dodge buses and crazy traffic), with no shoulder to ride on for a short but scary stretch of Doncaster. Kirk Johnson from Bike Edina, is lobbying with the City of Edina Bike Task Force to make Edina a more cyclist-friendly community. He wants feedback and is seeking volunteers to become involved in advocating for this change.

Doncaster is having a sidewalk put in on the east side of the street leading into Highlands, that will be a great improvement! We can do our part to lower congestion by putting our children on a bus, if it is available to us. Ride bikes, if it is doable. Walk to school once in a while or organize a carpool. Even one less car in the mix will help the whole system flow better and safer!

What we all individually choose to do adds up to a large collective sum. Rethink how your kids get to school is one change we can make to improve our communal morning drop off and pick up experience.

Highlands school discontinued the sale of bottled water in the cafeteria this past year. We can support the effort by refusing to buy plastic bottled beverages. The landfills are just one of the environmental problems that plastics has caused in the past 40 years of accumulation.

The Garbage Patch is an area in the Pacific ocean that has accumulated 40 years worth of plastics due to the swirling direction of the ocean’s currents. Plastic everything has gathered at this location, pulling plastic-trash in like a vortex of unnatural wonder.

These plastics contain bisphenol A and the fish mistake the bits of plastic for plankton and we eat the fish.

Sound scary? Take a No Plastics Pledge and don’t add to an already twice the size of Texas problem. When the clerk says, “Paper or plastic?” Say, “Neither.”

What else can I do?

Take a No Plastics Pledge

Have a stash of reusable bags with you when you shop. Don’t buy goods wrapped in plastics. Entertain, host a breakfast, dinner or party without plastic anything. When you donate something to Highlands school leave out the plastic or shop for an alternative. If you provide a snack for a school party, try and do it in a zero waste, plastics-free manner. Never buy plastic bottled drinks. Graciously accept a gift or donation, but explain why you must not accept the packaging it was contained in. Taking a “no plastics pledge” means that you will not buy or accept into your classroom or home anything that is plastic.

Kindly ask the gift giver to take away the plastic it came in, and use the moment to educate one more person about the Pacific Garbage Patch that affects all living things. Plastic breaks down into brittle bits (that fish mistake for plankton) but remains in landfills and eventually collects in the Pacific Garbage Patch forever.