Because of their flexibility, durability and affordability, plastic bags are one of the most used materials ever. Plastic bags are everywhere and they contribute massively to landfills and domestic waste sites. If you want to help prevent damage to the environment, one of the smartest ways is to use fewer, if any, plastic bags and to reuse the ones you already have. You don’t need a great imagination to do it. Here are some ideas to help get you started:
Don’t Throw Them Out
Its seems obvious but I bet many of us do it more than we think or would like to admit. Find a place to store them instead of throwing them in the bin.
thegreenpages / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Use Them as Rubbish Bags
Do you buy plastic rubbish bags when you have plenty of plastic bags at home which could be reused? While doing so, try to use waste disposal companies which will minimise the number of bags that end up in landfill.
Use Them for Packaging
You can use plastic bags to wrap any items or materials you want to send to other people. Don’t forget to include a note in the bags encouraging the recipients to reuse it like you just did! Ornaments, like Christmas-tree decorations, are fragile and need to be properly stored to ensure their safety. Plastics bags can be used as padding in boxes to store and protect fragile ornaments, picture frames, breakable plates etc.
Organise Your Freezer
Plastic bags are ideal for separating items in the freezer so that you can easily find them and grab them before your fingers freeze.
Not everybody’s favourite subject! But, if you have a dog or cat and have to clean up after it, you can reuse old bags instead of buying bags specially for the purpose.
Shoes can easily get damaged when stored in the closet if the toe area gets pressed down by weight. So before you store your expensive footwear why not stuff them with plastic bags in order to protect them from getting damaged or losing their shape.
Organise Your Suitcases
Plastic bags can be reused a lot when you’re travelling. You can put some in your carry-on bag to help store your food and to prevent leaking. You can use them in your suitcase to separate your shoes and laundry from other clothes, or in your beach bag to keep your wet swim suite and towel from the dry ones.
These are just a few of many possibilities. The main thing is to make full use (and reuse) of the bags we have and somehow cannot avoid collecting. After that, the goal should be to accumulate as few new ones as possible and use bio-degradable alternatives instead.
Andrew Mitchell recently decided to make his home much greener and he hired All Rubbish 2 Go to clear his house and garden of rubbish.