Neither paper nor plastic

So, one of the things that has been bugging me for a while is how quickly plastic bags accumulate in our household–every time one goes shopping, no matter how small the item being purchased, one acquires another plastic bag, or bags. And while we do our best to reuse them, we wind up with so many it’s hard to keep up–and, well, the bags still ultimately get dumped in a landfill somewhere, it just takes a little longer.

We’ve long had our own canvas grocery shopping bags–switching to paper or plastic only when we need more trash bags–but it’s the little purchases that really make the plastic pile up, the things you grab unexpectedly when running about town.

So when I saw some basic cotton string bags at the local Wild Oats, I finally picked one up.

The nice thing about these bags–unlike the ones we use for groceries–is that they roll up small enough to stick in a purse, so that you can have them on hand for small day-to-day purchases. And they’re huge–they hold way more than I expected. And I figure each time I use mine, that’s at least one less plastic bag I drag home. (ETA: One could also simply shove one of those accumulated old plastic bags in one’s purse and reuse it, too, to much the same effect.)

In the ultimate scale of things, this is a small matter, not one that’s going to solve the larger problems of the entire way our society is structured around throwing things away. But still, it does no harm and involves almost no effort–so I figure why not go for that small impact, and hope enough others are doing so that it maybe eventually adds up?