We are big fruit and veg eaters around here and every week we clean out the crisper bin at the bottom of the fridge. Every week what we throw out most is the plastic bags the fruit and veg came home from the supermarket in. The good news is that we don’t have a lot of waste, still some – nothing that a good meal plan wouldn’t fix! That is a project of another post.
The plastic waste has been on my mind. They are not the sort of plastic bags that can be reused and while they can be recycled that’s really not good enough. We needed to make a change to reduce the amount of plastic that was involved in our weekly shop.
We live in South Australia and a few years ago legislation was passed that required retailers to charge customers for plastic shopping bags, so we already shop with reusable shopping bags. I really wanted to tackle the fruit and veg bags.
Google gave me lots of posts about making bags from netting – great idea but too much effort for me right now. I finally found these at my local Spotlight for less that $15. They come in a set of 5, are the same size as those plastic bags and have a draw string to close them securely.
They are great! Checkout was easy as the operator could easily see what was inside and even scanned one of the stickers through the mesh. The other benefit is that when we shop next we have to clean out the crisper before we shop to retrieve the bags, so we know what we have left and what fruit the kids are preferring before shopping again.
The best thing, obviously, is that the amount plastic we throw out every week has dramatically reduced, and that can only be a good thing!