Paper, Plastic, or Cloth? What do you shop with?

Something that I want to make for selling are reusable shopping bags. I have a few bags for my personal use, and get a good feeling with the use of reusable grocery bags. I remember back when we switched form paper bags to plastic bags as a way of saving trees, but now we have all these plastic bags that end up in the landfill, and it is a side effect that no one seems to have thought about at the time the plastic bags were replacing the paper bags. With the leaning toward all of the Earth friendly things we are doing it is only natural for people to add green shopping to their efforts to make the world better.

If a person buys two bags of groceries a week for a year, and uses the same two cloth shopping bags for each of those purchases, they can keep an estimated 104 plastic bags from being used.

Now, make that a family of four that buys say six bags of groceries in a week every week for a year. We are now not using an estimated 313 bags. And for a neighborhood of 20 families, each buying say 4 bags a week on average... That would keep over 4,100 plastic bags from being used in a year. Just one neighborhood of friends all making the choice to use cloth shopping bags instead of store provided plastic bags.

That is a lot of bags that could be kept out of circulation, just by using cloth bags that can be reused with each shopping trip.