There is no shortage of articles, podcasts and presentations available online about the dangers of plastic and the detrimental impact it’s having on our environment. However, despite this wealth of information available, many people still choose to use plastic bags as their storage bag of choice. Whether its carrying your groceries from the supermarket to your home or storing your fresh fruit and vegetables and other foods, plastic is not the only answer and certainly isn’t the best one. Each one of us can make a huge difference to the world around us by making changes to adopt a more environmentally friendly lifestyle. Plastic bags can take thousands of years to break down and the thin plastic used for carrying and storage bags makes them difficult and expensive to recycle also. As a result, many plastic bags end up in landfill after just one use, causing toxic emissions as they rot, mixed with other waste.

Below are 5 reasons why we need to stop using plastic bags and start using re-usable bags instead:

Quality
Re-usable bags are made of far higher-quality materials, so they will certainly last longer than plastic bags, however this has other benefits also. Have you ever been walking home from the supermarket and a plastic bag tears and its contents end up all over the footpath? Or maybe you’ve had red marks etched on your hands from carrying heavy bags which have dug deep into your skin? This is a direct result of the quality of the cheap, flimsy plastic bags.

Quantity
With cheap plastic bags, you generally require far more of them as they are weaker and carry less. This also creates the issue of ‘the bag drawer’ or ‘the bag cupboard’ where dozens and dozens of plastic bags end up after each trip to Coles or Woolworths. With re-usable bags, you have a few good quality bags which last you for a long time meaning no clutter drawer and no need for 10-15 bags for every grocery shopping trip!

Food-Storage
Plastic food storage bags deprive their contents of oxygen which, for food such as fresh fruit and vegetables, means they will go bad quicker. Here at The Swag our all-natural bags allow the contents to breath, meaning your fresh fruit and vegetables will last 2-3 times longer than if they were being stored in an airtight plastic bag or container.

Cost
While re-usable food storage bags may be more expensive when it comes to their initial purchase, they will usually pay for themselves within a month or so by dramatically reducing how much food is wasted by keeping it fresh for far longer.

Cleanliness
The plastic bags people use for carrying their groceries home are free and even the airtight bags used to store food in the fridge or freezer are cheap, so its worth thinking about how clean these plastics can really be and the environment in which they’re manufactured. Harsh chemicals are often used in their production which we don’t want the food we ingest exposed to.