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What is produce bag

In Living Sustainable Lifestyle, Sustainable lifestyle, posted Oct 9, 2018

I love using my produce bags.

I made mine from an old fabrics and old curtains which my grandma gave to me.

She also taught me the basics of using a sawing machines and a basic stitches.

And after I learned from youtube.

What is produce bag:

Produce bag is a bag which you use instead of small plastic bag e.g. for shopping veggies or fruit.

I used mine at the fruit & veggie market, in a normal corner shop and also in supermarket. I have never had any problem with using them. Which makes me so happy.

I use my produce bags even for buying a nuts, seeds, beans and legumes and bulgur.

You can make your own produce bag from an old fabric you have at home or from an old t-shirt or you can buy it.

What to do if you don’t have your own produce bag but you would like to reduce plastic waste:

You can take a small plastic bags from home from your previous purchase and reuse them. And keep reusing them.

Some of the fruit & veggies can be bought without plastic bag like bananas, watermelon, honeydew melon and so on. It depends how much you buy. The sticker can be sticked to the produce you buy.

Please at least bring your own shopping bag where you put your shopping to avoid a plastic bag.

Why to avoid plastic bags:

This year 5 trillion plastic bags will be consumed. That is 160 000 a second.

Most bags are simply thrown out. Less than 1% are recycled. They are most often made from Polyethylene that takes centuries to degrade. Each ton of recycled plastic bags saves the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil.

Nearly 2 million plastic bags are used every minute.

Each year, 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide.

Plastic bag has an “average life” of 15 minutes.

160 000 plastic bags are used globally every second.

And only 1 – 3% of plastic bags are recycled worldwide.

In total, we use 100 million tons of plastic every year. Some 10% of this plastic end up in the oceans. In the ocean, the plastic is broken down to tiny pieces. These pieces are eaten by fish and cannot be digested. Consequently the plastic builds up and enter into the food chain. Seabirds, turtles, seals, sea lions, whales and fish eat the plastics. The death of one sperm whale found in California (USA) in 2008 was caused by 22.2 kilos of plastic that the whale had eaten. (theworldcounts.com)

Plastic constitutes approximately 90% of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface, with 46 000 pieces of plastic per square mile.

We create a lot of plastic waste. And a lot of it ends up in the oceans. All this plastic does not go away but builds up to create a gigantic “plastic ocean soup”. Imagine Russia made of plastic. Our plastic waste has created a gigantic “plastic soup” in the Pacific of up to 15 million square kilometres – almost the size of Russia. Over the next 10 years, the plastic soup could double in size. At this speed, the plastic grows as much as 8 football fields every second. The plastic soup consists mainly of plastic bottles and caps and above all, plastic bags. In the plastic soup there are 60 pounds of surface plastic to every one pound of plankton. Plastic normally takes thousands of years to decompose. (theworldcounts.com)