Shopping tip: Get a load of cloth bags

This summer I made the switch from using plastic bags to using cloth bags when I go to the store to buy groceries. I purchased, for the grand sum of 49 cents each, two cloth bags at the Brewer Goodwill store, and two larger cloth bags, for less than $2 each, at my local Hannaford store. The smaller bags are made of a French toile depicting lords and ladies in bucolic settings. The larger bags are green, but I’ve seen red and blue also. They are well-made, sturdy, have a flat bottom section, and fold neatly and compactly when not in use.

Shaw’s supermarkets also sell reusable grocery bags.

At first, because my plastic bag habit was so entrenched, I found it difficult to remember to take the cloth bags into the store with me when I shopped. But after I learned to leave them on the passenger seat or in the storage compartment on the passenger-side door where I could see them, rather than in the back seat, it was easy to grab them as I left my car and headed for the store. After about a week or so, the new habit kicked in.

In many ways, it is a relief not to tote my groceries home in plastic bags. First, I find plastic bags hard to carry. It hurts my hands. The handles stretch and sometimes break. The bags are slippery and hard to manage as I wrangle them out of the shopping cart and into my car. But the worst part is this: Inevitably, the motion of stopping and starting at traffic lights causes at least one of the plastic bags to disgorge its contents. Onions, apples and bottles of juice end up rolling around in the back of my car. More often than not, I find cracked eggs or a loaf of bread squashed when I get home. And, I have to repack the groceries into the bags when I get home. Most annoying.

Cloth bags, I have discovered, don’t disgorge my groceries. This is especially true of the bags with flat bottoms available for sale at supermarkets.

In my kitchen is a device I made for storing the many plastic bags I lugged home each year. I always had far more than I could store or reuse for some other purpose, such as lining wastebaskets. I am not very good at recycling plastic bags even though supermarkets provided containers for that purpose. I have good intentions of recycling but a bad memory.

Many years ago, there was a fad for cutting plastic bags into long strips and crocheting them into door mats, or fashioning them into holiday wreaths, but I was never impressed by the results, so for me, that was not an option. Besides, even if it’s shaped like a wreath and not a grocery bag, it’s still plastic and still needs to be recycled at some point.

Often, I am annoyed to find plastic bags littering my yard, blown there by some ill wind. Or I’ll see renegade plastic bags caught in the branches of trees or deflated in ditches beside the road, a blot on the landscape.

When I hand my cloth bags to the clerk at the grocery store checkout counter, I feel proud about making the switch. I get a 5-cent discount on my groceries for each cloth bag I use. True, that is not a princely sum, but it does make the point that supermarket owners acknowledge the plastic bag problem and are responding to it by rewarding those of us who use cloth bags, and by offering reusable bags for sale in their stores.

For those of us who like to make stuff, it’s easy to sew a few cloth bags for our own use, or for friends and relatives. It’s a great way to use up some of the fabric we have stashed away. We can unleash our creativity and make bags that are appliqued, embroidered, quilted or felted. One of my favorites is sewn from sequin-embellished denim fabric.

And speaking of jeans, it’s simple to cut off the leg of a pair of old jeans, sew the bottom edge closed, add handles and there it is, an almost instant tote bag that will stand up to the weight of groceries.

Cloth bags are easily available, easy to make and, once I got into the habit of taking them into the store with me, easy to use.

Try it, you’ll like it.

Snippets

In October, Veazie conservation committee member Suzanne Malis-Anderson approached Veazie Community School art teacher Courtney Harvey about taking on a cloth shopping bag design project. The 13 students pooled their ideas and came up with a logo drawn by Christiana Dagher and a slogan created by Joe DiStefano: You have the seeds, now plant the trees. The cloth bags are available at the Veazie Town Office for a $2 donation. Call the town office at 947-2781 for more information.

Ardeana Hamlin may be reached at ahamlin@bangrordailynews.net. or 990-8153.