I am somewhat romantic. Really, I am. I just don’t tend to equate romanticism with gift giving. Valentine’s Day will always have an element of meh for me thanks to the conspiracy between card manufacturers and elementary school teachers. I know that I am a bit of an exception in this regard, so I am offering this gift suggestion for the people that want to give a heart-shaped consumer good to their sweetie.
The folks at Wrapsacks have a Valentine’s package featured on their site that includes 2 reusable shopping totes that zip up into a heart-shaped pouch as well as 1 medium fabric gift bag. I have been using their shopping totes for the last 3 months and they are awesome. They have handles that are long enough to put over your shoulder but they are sized so that they aren’t too close to the ground if you choose to hold them in your hand. The handle material goes all the way down the sides of the bag so they aren’t the weakest part of the bag. I’ve had cheaper bags lose their handles after a few months of carrying stuff.
*Wrapsacks provided me with free bags for the purposes of review. I don’t typically ask for or receive review products because of my remote location.
I bought potatoes in a big jute bag this morning. In retrospect, the greener choice may have been filling up a shopping bag with local potatoes. I am faced with shopping on a tighter budget these days and these seemed like a good value. There are lots of blog posts floating around about how to live green and frugal at the same time. Making greener choices and saving money at the same time can be a bit of a juggling act. The commercial food industry sees green as a value added part of their business. If money was not an issue for me I would be paying the premium for organic food all the time. Put your hand up if money is not an issue.
Here are some suggestions that might help the planet and your bank balance:
Minimize food waste through careful planning and list making. When perishable items do go bad, make a note to buy less the next time. Shopping at markets where you can pick over the produce yourself will reduce the amount of waste that you deal with at home.
Comparison shopping isn’t all about price. Find out which vendors carry local produce. Sometimes a compromise between distance and price is in order. For instance, we buy Sicilian oranges this time of year even though there are local ones available. The distance is just around the 100km mark and they get pretty cheap in the middle of the season.
Plan your meals around seasonal produce. As much as we love strawberries, we are willing to forgo the joy for ten months out of the year to save money and fossil fuels.
You can reduce the amount of pesticides you consume by choosing varieties of produce that are not subjected to as much of it in conventional agriculture. Sadly, potatoes are on the list of 12 foods to avoid if you are worried about pesticides.
Prepare the bulk of your meals at home from scratch.
Eat less meat. If you love meat and you have a handful of tried and true meat heavy meals that you don’t want to give up a good way to accomplish this is to commit yourself to a Meatless Monday. We haven’t done that, but we typically have more than one meatless day. High protein produce is less expensive and better for the environment than meat. During our year in Bizerte, we developed a taste for chickpea sandwiches.
I am not a zealot when it comes to buying ecologically responsible food. Our first priority is to provide a balanced diet for my family. I do make a conscious effort to keep my eye our for ways to do that in ways that are both cheaper and greener.
This post hasn’t had a lot to do with reducing plastic waste. When it comes to food I look for every affordable plastic free option and when there are none I consider whether that item is important enough to compromise. The best example I can think of where I spend extra to avoid plastic packaging is with pasta. Barilla, the BEST PASTA IN THE WORLD, is available in boxes. The less expensive alternatives are in plastic bags.
I recently received two beautiful cotton batik reusable shopping bags from Wrapsacks.com. These bags fold and zip into a compact size. I like the way that the outside of the storage pouch doubles as a reinforced bottom for the bag. I am happy to finally have a grocery bag with shoulder length straps. Upon closer examination, I noticed that the strap material goes all the way down the sides of the bag and into the reinforced bottom. This should make them a lot more durable than the cheap bags that I bought on the street in Bizerte. The cheap bags have mostly held up for more than a year, but there have been two handle failures. One failure was the result of very heavy groceries and the other bag got caught in a bus door with me still standing on the sidewalk.
Catherine loves the ‘Marrakesh’ design (shown above). When I added this brand of bags to my reusable bag roundup earlier this month, I mentioned the wide variety of designs. Most of the designs are what I would describe as pretty. They were smart to include a design that’s not pretty and, strangely enough, it’s my favorite. The ‘Pedal Power’ pattern has black block printed bicycles and bicycle chains over a background of earthy oranges and browns. It would be perfect for anybody who drives their bike to the farmer’s market.
Michael Miner, the co-creator of Wrapsacks, regularly visits the production facility in Indonesia where the bags are ethically produced. While he was there recently, he took some stunning photographs of the batik dyeing process. I love the fact that they are still using the power of the sun as a dye fixative.
It’s a nice coincidence that I received these free review samples right before leaving for Gozo, where the plastic shopping bag has just recently become the target of some regulation. They had tried a small bag tax years ago, but retailers were willing to absorb the cost rather than inconvenience customers who were set in their ways. Now they charge 0.18 Euros.
I am reusing a statement made by Jason Sweeney as my title for this post. Those three words have sent my mind in a hundred different directions thinking about what impact the human pursuit of perfection has on this planet. Most of it isn’t good, some of it is involves plastic.
The concept was still rattling around in my head when I went to the kitchen this morning to make the kids some French toast with cooked fruit topping. The apples that I bought on Friday are not perfect. They look like the apples that I used to scrounge from abandoned homesteads in Canada. They taste delicious.
Consumers in the developed world supposedly want perfect apples. The customer is always right, and those customers get pesticides, genetic engineering and lots of protective packaging.
Walmart is a phenomenal success story and it has a huge impact on the retail landscape wherever it spreads. The largest retail corporation in the world has a lot of detractors from various segments of society, some of which overlap. But they sell reusable shopping bags to their customers for 50 cents, so they’re not all bad, right?
If you are stridently anti-walmart and there is a store nearby, why not stop in and pick up one of these bags? When you get home you, or a crafty friend, can add some extra taglines to the logo. It’ll really make a statement at the next local farmer’s market
One way that I avoid plastic packaging is to feed myself and my family lots of whole, fresh fruit every day. Here is a slide show of what we had over the course of a week
This is all relatively local and relatively in season. I hardly ever buy bananas. Besides the transport issue, all the banana boxes come wrapped thick plastic that I often see blowing around the streets.
I prefer to go to places where I can pick through the fruit myself. I had to learn this the hard way during strawberry season. I jumped at the chance to pay 1/2 the going price only to find that I had to throw about 1/2 of them away. When I living in Gozo, the strawberries were sold in plastic boxes. I was relieved when I found out that the fruit seller would take them back to reuse.
I’m usually an enthusiastic cheerleader about reusable shopping bags. Disposable plastic shopping bags are one of the most obvious targets for plastic reduction. I was given pause when I read a thoughtful article complaining about the fact that businesses are giving away tons of canvas bags as promotional items and that consumers have consumed more reusable bags than they should.
The author admitted to finding 23 reusable bags in his own home. They take 100s of times more energy to produce than the same number of ’single use’ plastic bags. Logic dictates that you have to use a bag hundreds of times before it’s supposed environmental benefit is realized. Do you have dozens of reusable bags in your closet?
Here is my advice for people who already have too many reusable shopping bags -
Start saying thanks, but no thanks to free reusable shopping bags.
Don’t feel too bad about your accumulated bags. Tell yourself that you were planning ahead for the next few decades.
Come out of the closet with the bags that you have accumulated. If they are hanging on a hall tree or sitting in a basket by the door, you are more likely to use them.
Pack food bank donations in a reusable grocery bag and donate the bag along with the food.
If you have some particularly cute bags that are in like new condition, use them in place of gift wrap when you have occasion to. The popular tradition of regifting might help move surplus reusable shopping bags into the hands of people who actually need them.
If you drive, pack several bags up as small as you can and put them in your glove compartment. These are your emergency stash for when you forget to bring your everyday bags.
Consider using your cloth shopping bags to carry items during activities instead of buying purpose specific tote bags.
Here is my advice to people who don’t have too many reusable shopping bags. -
Check to see if you have any single use plastic bags packed away. They are actually reusable to some degree. I save the ones that appear in my house for dirty jobs like potatoes. I will use the plastic bag to buy bulk potatoes a few times and them use it as a garbage bag.
Consider making your own bags from available materials.
Reusable shopping bags are typically larger and stronger than plastic shopping bags. Don’t think that you need 10 cloth shopping bags because you used to buy 10 plastic bags full of groceries on your big grocery run. I walk, so I know that 4 cloth bags is plenty for my market trips. I can’t carry more than that. 6 bags should be adequate for drivers who shop for a family.
I have seen cloth shopping bags in piles of used clothing here in Tunisia. That is definitely a good indicator that they are in surplus in the developed world. I bought new cloth bags from a guy in front of the vegetable market. They are very cheap woven synthetic material. I presently have five of them. I think I have had a handle failure with one bag and I used it to contain a pile of outgrown clothing that I put out on the street for people to take. I don’t know how many times I will have to use these bags in order to realize an environmental benefit.
Let’s get this out of the way first. Plastic waste doesn’t CAUSE flooding. Rain causes flooding.
Discarded plastic bags and plastic bottles DO impact the efficiency of flood control systems in several ways. Besides the obvious potential for clogging drains, plastic waste can also take up a lot of the volume in detention ponds. These problems are either dealt with using taxpayer funded labor and equipment, or they can be ignored with the hope that it never rains all that much. The danger presented by an accumulation of plastic trash in an urban storm drain can prove deadly after days of heavy rain.
Plastic bags were made the scapegoat during a particularly deadly monsoon season in Mumbai in 2005. Plastic bags did clog the system. The system was very old and not designed to deal with the massive population that live in shanties clustered around the city center. The system was also poorly maintained. The system was built before plastic bags were imaginable. Laws against plastic bags had been imposed before the 2005 floods that killed over 1000 people.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have places like Salt Lake County, Utah. It’s not a place where you expect to hear about deadly floods. It’s infrastructure is not particularly ancient or under funded. Plastic garbage does accumulate in the drainage system. Draper is a city of just under 40,000 people and it employs 3 people full time to clean the trash and debris from the drains. There are almost 14 million people in Mumbai. I don’t know if they have 1,000 people cleaning out the storm sewers, but that’s how many people it would take to be proportional to Draper. Littering is more prevalent in the developing world, so Mumbai should probably have several thousand people cleaning out the storm drains. They do have a squad of Plastic Bag Police.
Making an individual choice to use less plastic won’t do much to prevent floods, but if everyone made the same choice it could make a huge difference
This isn’t exactly a review of Fat Bottom Bags. I chose local solutions as much as possible and these bags are made in the North West of America. They caught my eye because they look quite a bit like the grass basket that my wife bought in Hergla.
Below is a bag made by Berbers from grass…
…Above is a Fat Bottom Bag made from plastic bags
Fat Bottom Bags are made out of single use plastic shopping bags that are supplied by several local households. Christi started out making bags as a hobby and as a way to make use of the bags that had been accumulated in her household and by her extended family. This was an unsustainable system (in a good way for once); the single use bags were being incorporated into durable reusable bags that were put to good use, thus curtailing the accumulation of disposable bags. Rather than move on to another project, Christi chose to broaden her collection efforts to dozens of local families and sell the finished product. I really like this concept. It is a much better idea than putting a pile of plastic bags into the conventional recycling stream. When that happens they could end up on a slow boat to China.
I am happy to add Fat Bottom Bags to my reusable bag roundup post.
Crocs are made from ethylene vinyl acetate. That should be enough to make me hate them, but footwear is complicated. Traditional materials like leather cause pollution during processing. Shoes are often made in sweatshops. The list goes on, it’s hard to get a guilt free shoe if you are a conscious shopper. I have been buying second hand as a way to dilute my responsibility, but that isn’t a sustainable strategy for everybody.
I don’t own any Crocs. The first time I noticed a guy wearing them was in 2003 on the packaging line at JustUs! Coffee. They were on the guy that had a thrift store shirt that said ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ but with ‘Don’t’ crossed out. Edgy.
I just heard that Crocs, Inc is on the ropes financially. Part of the problem is that they made a durable product for a finite market. The original models are one piece of molded plastic. From an environmental standpoint, they are better than a lot of conventional shoes because they can be recycled easily and cost effectively. If they had become even more popular than they did, I would expect to see drop boxes outside of stores for worn out Crocs. I don’t have any statistics for recycling rates for Crocs. I am guessing that a lot of them are taking up space in the backs of closets and that plenty of pairs are also in landfills and in the environment. If Crocs had promoted its product as the ideal recyclable shoe, they might have sold better. Shoe companies that do promote green models often use recycled materials.
I cannot find any information that would indicate that Crocs highlighted recycling or that they facilitated it. Treehugger put in their two cents back when the trend was at its height. Some key points they made were that they are lightweight and made in an efficient way. A big drawback that Treehugger noted was the over consumption of Crocs resulting from their trendiness and cheapness. In addition to the 8 million real Crocs per year, counterfeiters were adding plenty of plastic shoes as well. Crocs is or has been fighting 11 different companies who allegedly infringed on their proprietary process. I am pretty sure the items in my photo are Crocoffs.
The folks at Wrapsacks have a Valentine’s package featured on their site that includes 2 reusable shopping totes that zip up into a heart-shaped pouch as well as 1 medium fabric gift bag. I have been using their shopping totes for the last 3 months and they are awesome. They have handles that are long enough to put over your shoulder but they are sized so that they aren’t too close to the ground if you choose to hold them in your hand. The handle material goes all the way down the sides of the bag so they aren’t the weakest part of the bag. I’ve had cheaper bags lose their handles after a few months of carrying stuff. 
