Cutting Waste starts at home and in schools. My children have evoked a passion in me about education and the environment. I feel that everyone needs to start at home by taking a stance against convenience and make some hard decisions about how and where they shop and eat and what they are eating. For instance, my children love the seaweed packets and just this snack alone creates so much waste between the plastic that holds all the containers of seaweed, to the foil, preservative packets inside and the plastic that holds the seaweed itself. I am committed to not buying these and to reach out to companies who manufacturers that sell these products to ask them their role in helping save the environment as this is not helping the environment at all. This is just one small example. Maybe consider buying containers and bringing to supermarket and buying bulk to reduce the waste of plastic and boxes for cereal, rice, sugar, flour etc.. This is time consuming but totally worth helping reduce waste. We need to stop blaming and take responsibility in our individual homes to make a collective effort as a community to stop the waste. Don’t patron restaurants for take out food that use plastics, styrofoam and plastic bags or simply bring your own containers. This is all time consuming and maybe difficult for many to not think of convenience but convenience got us in this mess to begin with. But this all starts with us as parents taking responsibility and teaching our children. If kids wrote these letters too in their social studies or language arts class, it would be a great tool in teaching them to advocate for their future, learn writing skills and teaching them how to bring about change. We should have school gardens, teaching children about their food and creating a connection to their food so we can stop buying so much processed food. They could learn about composting, recycling , up-cycling and being more conscience about how they contribute and what they can do for our planet. This could create excitement in them to bring the ideas home and teach their parents. The lunch program definitely needs an overhaul as well. There should be a ban on bringing anything that is not in reusable containers if bringing a lunch to school and the cafeterias should have only reusable cutlery, cups and plates. We need to start first at home with cutting down our waste.