Help the earth...a step at a time

It's up to each of us to do what we can, however large or small, to help the planet. It all helps. In regard to plastic grocery bags, it is estimated that somewhere between 500 billion (500,000,000,000) and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year! Well even if you are very careful to "recycle" the bags (and how many of us are that careful?), plastic is very hard to recycle effectively. It must be sorted very carefully, some types can only be recycled once, and the bottom line is that most of these plastic garbage bags end up in the garbage.

So Shirley and I were talking and she decided to experiment with making some durable cloth grocery bags. Our goal is to have 10 of them in each car, so that even if we stop at a store on a whim, we can use our own bags. If she gets it down to enough of a system, who knows? This could even turn into a small business...which beats her current unemployment :-) ...so here are the first 3 bags, each with a slightly different style as the experimentation continues. We've already used these several times and they are far stronger than any paper or plastic bags at the stores! Very cool.

Comments

[Stan Rogers]

You've left out the biggest benefit, one that will win over even the "nuke the whales" crowd -- the handles on your cloth bags will not cut through to the bone if there's more than one large can of something or other in the bag.

[Joe Litton]

Stan - Hey, good point. We took these bags to the store a day or two ago and one of them had our holiday turkey in it and various other things ...so it had to be 15 or maybe 20 pounds in that bag and I was able to carry it confidently by the straps with no loss of cargo nor flesh :)