Project SESAME Update

Photo courtesy of www.cvcoffee.com

For those of you following Project SESAME (Save the Earth SAve MonEy), my little cousins have come up with yet another brilliant idea. Bringing plastic utensils along to work with your lunch, or even keeping a box of them in your office, is easy and convenient enough. Some of us, realizing the implications of bringing these forks, knives, and spoons, have even opted for grabbing our own metal (and reuseble!) silverware along with our lunches. We are lucky here at USEE, as our office comes equipped with a small kitchen where we have a stash of silverware to use, wash, and use again.

Disposable plastic utensils leave a long trail of environmental impacts starting from the production of the plastic and continuing on through to the end-all resting place of the landfill. Those of us who aren't lucky enough to have silverware available at the office and just can't seem to remember to bring our silverware to and from work with us everyday, other options abound. But what about kids? Many kids bring their lunches to school nearly everyday, but are often forgetful about bringing things home, especially small items like silverware. (Think of all those times in elementary and middle school you or someone you knew had to dig through the garbage cans after lunch looking for the retainer that was accidentally thrown away in a folded-up napkin...)

The newest way to SESAME that my cousin, Olivia, came up with this week is to "bring home and reuse your plastic spoon." My aunt wasn't willing, understandably, to risk losing all of her fine cutlery to the dumpsters, so they bought one box of plastic spoons. The goal is for their family to "bring home and reuse your plastic spoon" to make that one box last all year long. What a great way to SESAME!