Hi, I’m Shell from EOF.org, and today Angie and I will be shipping breastmilk long distance with dry ice. You can use this short video as a visual accompaniment to the breastmilk shipping instructions that you can find on www.eatsonfeets.org.

For our breastmilk shipping project today we will need an ice cooler, cardboard box, packing paper, hammer, dry ice, packing tape, two labels, and a pair of gloves.

The first and most important part in handling breastmilk is the washing of hands. Angie will be washing her hands in the warm water for 40-60 seconds. And moving in super-duper fast forward time we can see that Angie is paying special attention to her fingers and her wrists, and no surprise here, when she’s done washing her hands she will dry them, and then put on her protective gloves. The gloves are to protect her hands from the dry ice, but we found they were also helpful in handling the ice-cold bags of breastmilk. Angie is going to break the ice up on the floor and with a hammer, attempting to keep the ice within the bag. We only needed a thin layer of ice on the bottom of the ice cooler, about a cup, and we used a total of 5 pounds of dry ice but in the end, we think that 3 pounds would have done. We also decided to put a sheet of packing paper over the dry ice, to help the bags lay a little neater in the ice cooler.

Once the ice cooler is ready for the milk, Angie will sort through them placing the oldest milk in the bottom of the cooler. That way the recipient will unpack the newest milk first, and the oldest milk will be available for first use. Notice that these bags are sitting in a cardboard box and not loose in the freezer, also this freezer drawer stays closed when the main freezer door is opened. It’s important not to pack the breastmilk in the door of a freezer. When you’re ready to put the bags of milk into the ice cooler, you’ll want to pack them end to end as Angie is demonstrating here. Also, you’ll find that the thinner bags of milk pack a little nicer than the thick ones do. Most of Angie’s milk held between 4-7oz. You’ll want your layers of breastmilk to fit nice and snug but to also have some wiggle room to accommodate breastmilk expansion.

Angie had about 250oz of breastmilk to ship, which gave us about a layer and a half of breastmilk. That meant we had to fill up the empty space with paper and more dry ice. You want to make sure that all the crevices are filled. This helps keep the breastmilk more frozen but also to keep it from being jostled. You can see that the cooler is packed to the top with the paper, and now we’re going to show you the lid placement. I know it seems simple but there’s something here that I want to show you. This cooler is nice because it has the tabs on the side. You want your lid to be snug but also have some room for the dry ice gas to expand and leave the cooler. Here we have our handmade label, nothing fancy. Because it has the clips on the side we’re only going to secure the lid with two strips of tape, and now that the lid is secure it’s ready to be placed in the cardboard box. We weren’t able to find the box exactly the size that we wanted so we just used the size we had on hand. Since this box is a little bigger were going to have to pack it with more packing paper. This is to protect the temperature of the cooler and also to prevent jostling. Another handmade label on the outside of the box, and for the cardboard box we’re actually going to tape it very securely with several strips down each side. And that’s it, our box is ready to be shipped.

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