I am always looking for ways to lessen the plastic found in my house and avoid bringing in more plastic as well. It’s really just a matter of being mindful about what I buy and purchase.

So, one of the ways that I have used to lessen the amount of plastic I go through, is using compostable bags. I love my homemade compostable produce bags. I mean, why not sew your own long-lasting bags that can be washed, mended and then fully composted at the end of their life. It’s a little thing, but it builds a different relationship with the foods we choose, our shopping habits and the waste we create.

Making more sustainable choices

Choosing foods we can scoop into bags ourselves also shifts where and how we shop. If there isn’t a zero-waste store near you, why not organise a bulk foods group with your friends, workmates or neighbours. Or while the children are home, why not make some bags with them. Let them pick the fabric and teach them to sew these simple bags – then they’ll remember to take them, and remind you too!

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Make your own bags

I go to a local food cooperative in town, and there I can get scoops of things and you can either put them into bags that they supply, or you can take your own bag. So this is a bag that my son actually made and we just found some scraps of lightweight fabric and he just did a simple bag. It has a drawstring top where you can just simply knot it around like that. We chose fabrics that we thought would be really lightweight. So it’s not adding too much extra weight when we go back in to weigh them.

I also have a bag that was from when we bought a bedsheet set from the local organic supplies – they give you these really nice bags. So I’m always on the lookout in secondhand stores or wherever I am, for really lovely little lightweight bags. Now the thing is that – because they’re cotton – at the end of the life we can compost these as well. It’s about really trying to think about how we’re not contributing to the waste stream by the day me live.

The average life of a plastic bag is 15 minutes

There’s so much waste that we create simply through packaging something. About 40% of the plastics that are used are in packaging and most of that’s just simply thrown away. The average life of a plastic bag is 15 minutes and it can last for millennia in the ground or in the oceans or you know broken down into smaller and smaller particles getting into the guts of wildlife. Apparently, over 90% of seabirds have plastic in their guts. It gets everywhere when we create plastic waste, the only way to fix this is the create less plastic waste.

So I’ve noticed that in the shops there has been a big shift and you’ve probably noticed that too, that they file their single use bags. You know putting fruit and veg into things, like compostable bags or paper bags. But even then you want to try and avoid those because they still have fossil fuels embedded in them and water embedded in them. And you know, they’ve been transported a long way.

Packaging Waste

What I have noticed though, instead of a single-use plastics – particularly when we’re looking at things like you know the chickpeas or other sorts of grains like that – often come in thicker plastic bags. You know those Ziploc bags which the idea I suppose is that you buy those and then take them home and reuse them. And wash them out and use them over and over again and that’s great and you can do that. But how many can you have before you have too many of those thick ones? And then they actually take far longer to break down. It’s a bit like those synthetic shopping bags that we buy, because they all never break down either.

So think differently about what kind of things you take to the shops with you. Something that’s compostable, something that can be made from scraps, something that you can wash easily, something that’s lightweight. And then, whenever you’re out and you’re at your bulk store you can go in. And you know that you’ve got something that’s not going to be creating waste at the end of it.