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Waste Diversion Elevated Enviro Ratings:

Healthy Choice Gourmet Steamers

In this review we take a look at microwave dinners and how sustainable they are for the environment. We review one that appears to be healthy. Is it healthy for our enviroment? How sustainable is it? What of it could be diverted from the landfill? Our focus is waste diversion and we rate every day products through reduce, reduce and recycle.

Okay, the outside packaging is all paper. This is nice as we know for sure it can be recycled. However, the amount is excessive and there is a lot of dead space. I know companies have to sell products and they do it  by packaging design but when you consider the scale of how many of these are made it would be tons of paper waste.

The microwaveable bowl is sealed by a thin plastic film. This plastic film is common on these dinners. We don’t know the quality of the plastic, it is likely low and if so, there is not a market for it to be recycled. This film will likely be landfilled.

The bowl has a steamer dish that pops out. This and the bowl itself is made of what appears to be the same plastic. The quality is unknown. It is likely low and just like the film, low quality plastic does not have a market to be recycled. This is because most recycling facilities can only recycle higher quality plastic like you find with your larger plastic yogurt jugs.

What we do like about this product is that the food and sauces do not come is separate plastic bags. some products have this and it is very wasteful. This product recovers some points for not having that.

What do we give this product as an Elevated Rating? 2.3 out of 5.