Colorful Bags for the Green Girl

For me, it started about a year ago at my favorite SuperFresh store. I saw the colorful sacks hanging next to the registers and knew, for only $1 each, I must have them.

From then on I’ve found the reusable bag an invariable craze, with chains like Target, and even the lesser-known Acme market jumping on board. What is it about these bags that make them such a hot item, besides their colorful pictures and handy design? Of course their marketing as reusable and eco-friendly is a sure seller, helping to reduce thousands of pounds of extraneous plastic waste, but what is in the bags themselves that make them so “green?” Here I’ll go in-depth into some of our favorite reusable bags.

We’ll start with those colorful Elizabeth Haub bags I first saw on the SuperFresh shelf. The Elizabeth Haub Foundations for Environmental Law and Policy, which produce the bags, is one of the oldest foundations with concern for the affect of industrial progress on the environment. It serves as a branch of the Karl Schmitz-Scholl Fund for Environmental Law and Policy, founded by Elizabeth Haub in honor of her father.

The bags themselves are made largely of Polypropolene, a plastic polymer used in food packaging and plastics, but which is also completely recyclable. The bag handle is nylon which flexible PVC piping is used to weave the panels together. These parts prove to be recyclable as well.

I enjoy these bags not only for their variety of colors and great price, but also for their durability. I use the bags not only for grocery shopping, but also for toting books from class to class, and even as a purse. They do tend to get crinkled, but none of my bags have every broken (even the one I bought way back when.)

Target’s bags are a little different. Made by Green Bag, a company that supplies polypropylene fabric bags to various companies across the nation. While the material is the same as Elizabeth Haub bags, the fabric nature of Target’s bags make the handles softer, but also makes them susceptible to tears around the seams since instead of PVC piping, these bags use a melting technique to connect panels. Target’s bags are also notably smaller, but their designs are simple and appealing.

Acme market sells a type of bag similar to Target, as it also uses polypropylene fabric, although with a slightly different design.

In all, there are a wealth of choices now when it comes to reusable grocery bags, but it’s still up to us to remember to bring them with us when we shop and also to recycle them when they’ve outlives their usefulness. These bags, while very helpful when it comes to reducing waste, are still not BioBags.