I celebrated the last full day of school last June like it was the start of holiday season. “This is the last time I have to pack you guys lunch until September,” I told my kids.

Of course, I was wrong about that, because the next week, my daughter started a ballet program that had her in dance class five to seven hours a day, six days a week, and she sure needed lunch. A really big lunch. Which required a really big lunch box.

And as long as I was packing her lunch every day, and mine, I packed one for the stay-at-home son and his farming dad. Sometimes, as long as the assembly line was going, I packed lunch for a colleague as well.

Once the ballet program ended, I backed off a little. As long as there was lots of fruit in the house, I could leave a few sandwiches or a bowl of pasta salad in the refrigerator and trust the gang wouldn’t starve while I was at work.

But school’s starting again soon, and packing season is upon us.

Packing good, healthy lunches is challenge enough, but doing it without creating mountains of trash makes it even harder. U.S. school kids produce an average of 67 pounds of garbage a year from their lunches, according to the EPA and just about everyone who sells reusable lunch kits. Our district is small, with around 960 kids, but that still adds up to more than 64,000 pounds of trash a year.

Green Teacher Magazine says waste from lunch is the second-largest contributor to the school waste stream, after office paper. And the EPA says 30 percent of all waste generated yearly comes from packaging.

You can cut down on your contribution — and save money — by avoiding (OK, cutting down on) things you’ll use once then throw away, like plastic bags, plastic wrap, foil and even waxed paper. And the easiest way to reduce waste in your kids’ lunch boxes is to avoid single-use anything: juice boxes, mini-snack packs, individual-sized yogurts, the infamous Lunchables, plastic spoons.

We save reusable containers and bottles to make our own personal-sized containers of fruit, vegetables, cheese, salads or chips. They seem to show up even without our buying takeout, mostly from a friend who comes over for Sunday dinner and brings her own takeout containers to ensure that we’ll fill them for her Monday lunches.

And most people seem to have a drawer full of reusable containers — either purchased or saved from take-out. Small canning jars or bottles work too, and we hang onto small drink containers to fill with juice for lunches. For those trying to avoid plastic, there are stainless steel drink, snack and meal containers out there too, for a pretty price.

We pick up cheap stainless forks and spoons at thrift stores for the lunch boxes and wrap them up in the oldest of the cloth napkins. They mostly come back home again, although it looks like I’d better look for a few more forks before school starts up.

Buying bulk or larger packages to divide into serving sizes for lunches will save money as well as reducing waste. And the kids like the variety that comes with little packages — cherry tomatoes or peppers from the garden, chunks of cheese, pretzels, nuts. And with more families thinking “green” and “frugal,” they’re not the only kids eating like that at the lunch table anymore.

Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and features editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.

Have a question or a topic you’d like addressed on Greenpoint? Email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.