The Most Sustainable Shopping Bag

Grocery bags. The perfect example of a seemingly straightforward sustainability issue that turns out to be quite complicated. 

Plastic bags are easy to hate. They get caught in trees and wind up in waterways and get eaten by turtles. Paper bags seem bad too; for me, they conjure images of deforestation. And anything disposable is inferior to something reusable, right?

But cloth bags are no clear winner. The carbon footprint of a cloth bag is quite high when you consider all the inputs that go into it—from producing the fertilizer that's used to grow the cotton to shipping the materials and relatively heavy bags all around the world. Some experts estimate that you would need to use a cotton bag over 7,000 times to make it a lower-impact choice than using single-use plastic bags. That's 45 years of using the same cloth bag, even if you shop three times a week!

While a cloth bag should last a long time, it may not hold up for a full half century. And it's not easy to dispose when it finally does die. Watch this video for a great comparison of the environmental impact of different types of bags throughout their lifecycles. 

What we can say for sure is that the best shopping bag is the bag you already own—whatever material it’s made of.

The second-best bag is one that already exists but is not being used or is destined for the landfill. And the world already has a lot of those bags (including right now at Full Circle)! 

A few weeks ago, a local company contacted us about an enormous supply of cloth shopping bags they received with the wrong company name printed on them. The printer wouldn't take them back. So rather than watch a thousand bags go to the landfill, we adopted them and have been covering the logos with scrap fabric shaped like the state of Kansas.

Without casting too much judgment on companies or organizations trying to do the "green thing" by selling or giving out promotional tote bags, we hope this serves as a good reminder of one massive problem with organization swag: that so much of it ultimately ends up in the trash. Printing errors aside, the world simply has enough of this stuff (from T-shirts to coffee mugs to tote bags) already. 

If you need more shopping bags, you can find them in thrift stores, at garage sales, on Facebook Marketplace, or in giveaway groups like Buy Nothing. You can ask friends if they have some they aren't using. You can reuse whatever paper or plastic bags you already have, and recycle them when they’re too worn to use anymore. Creating new bags is not sustainable at a time when the global reusable bag industry is worth billions and there are millions of bags already in circulation. Let’s first use what we have, then use scrap materials if we need to make more. 

[Sidenote: When I was growing up in the 1990s, my mom reused our plastic Dillons bags over and over. She probably got 15 or 20 grocery trips out of these "single-use" bags before they were worn out—more uses than the average T-shirt gets today!]

We've thought at various times over the last five years about the bags we use for Full Circle deliveries. We currently use recycled paper bags and encourage you to send them back for reuse—which many of you do! Now that we have a large supply of cloth bags, we will work those into our system as well. Going forward, you can use one of our cloth bags—or any reusable bag of your choice—for your Full Circle delivery order. 

If you'd like a cloth bag from Full Circle, order one (or two or three so you have at least one to exchange) from our Shopping Bag product listing. Plain bags (gray with a white Avilla logo) are free, up to six per customer. Decorated bags (with a state of Kansas patch covering up the Avilla logo) are $5.00 each. If you'd like to decorate your own bag, go right ahead! We can even share our Kansas pattern; just request one in your order note or send us an email. 

To use your cloth bag for deliveries, set it out for us to pick up when we drop off your order, and we'll fill it up for you next time. Make sure to keep your packing slip attached or write your name inside the bag so we can ensure it always gets back to you.

So to sum this all up: shopping bag sustainability is complicated, but a few basic points are pretty simple:

• If you already have a bunch of shopping bags, just keep using what you've got.
  
• If you need another bag, find one that exists but isn't being used. We've got a bunch right now at Full Circle! If you know how to sew, you could also make a bag from scrap fabric. 
• If you work for an organization or company that's thinking of making promotional tote bags: don't do it! Unless you're making them from completely reused materials, it's unsustainable. And it's just unecessary. If you need ideas for sustainable fundraisers, promotions, or employee appreciation gifts, consult the internet, read this blog post, or send us an email. We would be happy to give you some suggestions!
  

and have a nice day!

-Justine