Don't you love the Internet? I stumbled across morsbags.com after mindlessly wandering through about 15 links. I'm not even sure what I started out looking for, but what a wonderful place to end.Morsbags are a recyclable answer to the 1 million plastic bags that are consumed globally *every minute*. These seemingly benign bags end up in landfills and oceans, and, if you're going to be Machiavellian, ultimately add to your grocery bill. (I'm not sure about you, but the baggers at my local market seem disinclined to put more than one item in each bag.) I consider myself somewhat conscientious about the blight of plastic shopping bags, but I often forget to keep spare reuseable bags in the car when I go shopping, and find that I have a huge bag full of little plastic shopping bags stuffed in my basement. Multiply my bag stash by hundreds of millions of shoppers, and you see the problem.
Morsbags.com offers a free, easy sewing pattern (great for recycling old sheets) for reusable fabric shopping bags. The site also has a cool map showing, globally, the number of morsbags that have been made and reported. Each bag has the potential to eliminate dozens of these throwaway plastic bags.
At the time I'm writing this, nearly 18,000 morsbags have been made. If each is used a dozen times, which is likely a conservative estimate, that's 216,000 plastic bags that won't be getting into the stomachs of marine life, or ending up flapping off trees in our parks.
I attend industry trade shows periodically, and consequently have a plethora of logo-emblazoned tote bags. Morsbags.com made me get off my butt and actually put the tote bags in the car so that I have no excuse for using plastic shopping bags. In addition, I'm going to make morsbags for Max and Tommy out of an old sheet from Max's room, so that they can help at the grocery store and start to internalize that we don't need throwaway plastic bags.
Happy sewing!
3 comments:
Great Earth Day post! I intended to write something meaningful but got so carried away with the research I was doing for that post about the Sears Catalog houses that I ran out of time. Oops.
Love these bags. It makes me crazy how they put things like milk and laundry detergent in plastic. I'm always lecturing the baggers with, "If it has a handle, it doesn't need a bag!" They just love me at the neighborhood Kroger... ;-)
I've printed out the instructions, and goodness knows, I've got PLENTY of fabric. I'm going to maek a few of these. . . really, I am. Alex will nap for a couple of hours this afternoon, Dennis is at work and If the 20-minute time the morsbag people provided can be trusted, I should be able to whip out at least a 1/2 dozen or so.
Just so you know. . . the folks at morsbag are liars. Twenty minutes, my Aunt Fanny! I've made two bags. TWO! And that is over the course of two of Alex's naps. But I'm pressing on. I have the fabric cut for two or three more bags and I'm hoping that by the time I get to the last one, I'll get to the promised land of 20-minute completion time. I think it could be done if you had 3 or 4 people doing this on an assembly line. . . one person to cut, one person to press and a 2 or 3 people to stitch them up. Perhaps we could arrange a morsbag party. Let me know. . . I'd be game!
Post a Comment