I try not to bring any new plastic in the house.
My grandma Sientje, one thing i remember is that she washed all her plastic baggies and hung them out to dry outside the kitchen door, this was 1970-ish. A thing that was not done then. But ha! somehow i probably always was the reuser. And going through an era of recycling, which i fully embraced, but was always odd for me, i kept reusing what i could.
I do think many of us have now re-entered the concept of reusing, which includes making things out of things that otherwise end up in the dump.
So yesterday when a friend posted something about single use plastic, the post looked like such plastic was a good thing, but as it turned out she only meant that buying a brand new grocery bag might not be the better solution. To which i can fully agree .
If people buy a new bags every few years, probably nothing is gained.
So i wonder how long do you use your grocery bags?
I suppose my oldest bag is at least 20 years old, I made it from second hand fabric (double for sturdiness). So in essence it is older still.
I can honestly say i never bought a grocery bag, and always had lots, things come to me:) but i have to say my husband got a bunch of woven plastic ones for free with the opening of a grocery store. So i call that cheating. But hey what does end up in my house, gets used as long as it lasts.
4 comments:
Plastics are so present in our lives these days, aren't they? I try to reuse plastic bags and I wash out and reuse food storage bags. I have fabric reusable grocery bags, but, since the pandemic, I've been picking up my groceries curbside at the store and the store clerks bag up my groceries in reusable plastic bags. I use those plastic bags to the extent possible or take them back to the store where they have recycling bins for the plastic grocery bags.
I try to avoid single use plastic but it's not always possible, especially the way some foodstuffs are packaged in the supermarkets. I reuse as many plastic bags as I can and have a few hessian shopping bags that are so old I don't remember where or when they were bought. I recycle as much plastic as I can, which in this area is either via the fortnightly kerbside collection, to the supermarket collection bins or to the recycling yard.
I cannot remember when I last had a plastic shopping bag, the ones that came for free or almost free at the supermarket check-out. They have disappeared here altogether. I do remember collecting foreign plastic bags when I was a teenager, looking cool coming to class with the books in a Danish or a French bag after the summer break.
There are several cloth shopping bags stuffed in my bicycle panniers, those and my backpack will do. One of the cloth bags dates back to the 1950s, my grandmother made it from a piece of table linen. She was a thrifty person, the bag is worn smooth but sturdy.
Thank you ladies, I wonder if many of our grandmothers were thrifty, for me for sure my mom was not, but maybe it is a thing that it did skip a generation or two.
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