Green Shopping

Reusable Bags for Green Shopping.

A small, easy, yet huge impact step to living greener is to switch to reusable shopping bags. Did you know that anywhere from 500 billion to one trillion plastic shopping bags are consumed each year? These bags end up in the landfills, along the highways, and in the oceans, contaminating our world. Environmental clean-up crews site plastic bags as one of the 12 most common items polluting our earth, and are responsible for the deaths of thousands of marine animals annually as they eat them thinking they are food.

Plastic bags are made using one of our currently most expensive, non-renewable, incredibly polluting resources- petroleum. They are seldom recycled, so although they are cheap for the stores to use, the environmental cost is incredible. So let's join the "BYOB" campaign- Bring Your Own Bag! It's simple- bring your own bags when you go shopping to tote back your goods.

Some good choices:
*Book Bags
*Large Purses
*Canvas Totes
*BackPacks
*Diaper Bags

You may already have a good starter stash at home, and can find many cheap options at thrift stores and online! Now our local Hannaford and WalMart are offering fairly cheap options as well, and Hannaford offers you a small discount for each fabric bag you bring to the checkout and use. Something else to consider as you build up your stash- the small plastic grocery bags don't hold much, so you will need far fewer fabric bags to hold the same amount of food and goods. Bonus if you want to save trips from the car to the house when you get home!

Another way to go green is to choose a fabric gift bag instead of paper. A fabric gift bag can be given, used over and over by the recipient, and re-gifted. Blessed Baby has many options in-store for green shopping- come and see!