I’m loving that it is now trendy to bring your own reusable grocery bags when you shop. It means that I no longer receive confused blank stares from clerks and baggers at the checkout when I hand over cloth sacs for my groceries to go into!

I started evading plastic grocery bags by accident back when I was in college. Since I didn’t have a car, I was either on my bike or on foot when I shopped, so it just made sense to carry my purchases in a backpack. At the grocery store I loaded up my pack at the checkstand without the need for plastic or paper grocery bags.

I eventually got a car, and no longer had to carry my groceries on my back, and for a short while relied by default on the convenience of store supplied “paper or plastic” sacks. But  grocery bags seem to multiply in a small kitchen, and despite being diligent about reusing them, there were always more coming in than I could find ways to repurpose. And so, with the help of my sewing sister, I made some sturdy cloth sacs with handles and started carrying them in my car to have on hand whenever I happened to stop in for groceries or other shopping errands. Most of the original batch of bags I made are still doing their duty almost 12 years later!

Switching to reusable shopping bags is an easy and inexpensive step you can take in your quest to live a greener lifestyle. Functionally, cloth reusable bags do the same job as the disposal types, so it really boils down to a minor matter of convenience. After you unload your groceries, you have to remember to put the bags back in your car so you’ll have them the next time you stop at the store. And when you get to the store, don’t forget to take them in with you! If you reach the front of the checkout line, realize you forgot your bags, and try to dash out to your car to get them, you risk lots of annoyed people and dirty looks! But other than that, it’s an easy green lifestyle change to make.

Switching to reusable shopping bags can be either low cost (watch for sales and you can get store bought reusable shopping bags for 50 to 99 cents) or no cost (sew your own from old blankets, clothing or other recycled fabric). Or for the fashion conscious, you can buy designer reusable shopping bags in hip colors and with trendy designs, slogans or labels. If you regularly shop at more than one store, and feel weird about taking a shopping bag with one store’s logo into a competing store, you can buy ‘generic’ bags too.

Benefits of reusable shopping bags include:

They are usually bigger and stronger, so they hold more = fewer trips from the car to the house when unloading!

If you used to choose paper, now you are saving trees. Although paper is biodegradable, the manufacturing eco-cost is high because pulp and paper mills are among the worst polluters of air and water. 

If you used to choose plastic, now you are saving landfill space and preventing ugly plastic litter that never biodegrades. The manufacturing eco-cost of plastic bags is lower than paper (they require less energy to produce and create fewer atmospheric emissions and waterborne wastes). But plastic is made from crude oil, a dwindling nonrenewable resource, and petroleum bags are non-biodegradable.

You don’t have to deal with storing or figuring out how to reuse all the plastic sacs that result from each shopping trip.

Cloth bags are washable (in the case of spills or leakage)

Some stores are starting to charge now for the paper and/or plastic sacs they provide. Other stores (IKEA is an example) have stopped supplying one time use bags altogether. So whether you switch to reusable shopping bags for economic reasons or earth friendly reasons, the motivation is there.