The greenest lunch box

Most school lunches require plenty of packaging--there are brown bags, juice boxes, plastic baggies, and more. In a year, all that food packaging generates 67 pounds of trash per child, totaling 3.5 billion pounds. It's enough to make an environmentally-minded parent cringe.

But the Lunchopolis line of lunch boxes comes with four containers and a drinking bottle that are designed to be easy to reuse. The bottle, for instance, has a wider mouth than most bottles so that it's easy to pour in liquids and add ice cubes.

There's also a financial boon to packing a "garbage-free" lunch, as the Lunchopolis creators describe their innovation. You can buy lunch foods in bulk, and save on food, if you have an easy way to transport it. Even better, you don't have to pay for plastic baggies that are going to wind up in the trash after only a few hours in a lunch bag. The Lunchopolis lunch boxes are a little pricier than other lunch boxes, but their going to last through more than just one school year--unlike most of the plastic lunch boxes that are lucky to make it to December, let alone May.

The lunch boxes come in a bright green, pink polkadot, or water droplet pattern. They're insulated and guaranteed lead-free. Lunchopolis lunch bags are priced at $31.99.