Tales from a bag lady.
Plastic shopping bags concern people like me who care about how our environment looks, and how it might function in the future. Besides filling our landfills with unnecessary plastic, these bags escape our hands and end up blowing around the streets and stuck in trees and fences. This one was found near my home:
And on the streets of Africa last fall, the sights were abysmal.
I remember when the big supermarket chains first began offering reusable cloth bags to their customers. I thought: What a great idea! Inspired, soon after an Earth Day somewhere in the 1990s I started purchasing store-brand shopping bags as I could afford them.
As time went on, the design and colors of reusable store-bags changed, but I continued to buy bags from different stores as the whim befell me. Eventually I ended up with a hodge-podge of variously-logoed cloth bags. I was a walking advertisement for many establishments as I handed them to the bagger at the check-out stand.
The bags were stronger than plastic, but the handles tore if you filled them with too many groceries. Eventually the bags became so dirty that I had to wash them. But they shrank! After washing, barely any groceries would fit into a bag. And the printed logos started to fade and crack.
Click on "read more" for more of this blog entry. Click here for how to make the bags: Bag-Lady Bags
» read more
And on the streets of Africa last fall, the sights were abysmal.
I remember when the big supermarket chains first began offering reusable cloth bags to their customers. I thought: What a great idea! Inspired, soon after an Earth Day somewhere in the 1990s I started purchasing store-brand shopping bags as I could afford them.
As time went on, the design and colors of reusable store-bags changed, but I continued to buy bags from different stores as the whim befell me. Eventually I ended up with a hodge-podge of variously-logoed cloth bags. I was a walking advertisement for many establishments as I handed them to the bagger at the check-out stand.
The bags were stronger than plastic, but the handles tore if you filled them with too many groceries. Eventually the bags became so dirty that I had to wash them. But they shrank! After washing, barely any groceries would fit into a bag. And the printed logos started to fade and crack.
Click on "read more" for more of this blog entry. Click here for how to make the bags: Bag-Lady Bags
» read more
