I'm so proud to be introducing our first crafting kit! A great deal of love and time and details went into making this kit over the past several months.
We all know single use bags are terrible. But so are a lot of the alternatives. To get around the single use bag tax, some stores are now using thicker plastic bags, that still only get used once or twice and cause twice the damage. Brand new organic cotton totes are better, but they still cause a lot of stress on the environment.
I wanted to design an alternative that was truly more eco-friendly, sturdy enough to last, and easy to bring along to the store. This bag folds into itself, so you can stow it in your backpack, purse, pannier or car and have it with you wherever you go. They are lightweight but still strong enough for getting groceries. The sewing pattern is straightforward so it's accessible for beginners, but still fun to put together for an experienced sewist.
It may sound cheesy that a little crafting kit is an act of resistance to climate change and consumerism, but for me it is. It's a way to live my values, even in small ways. There are so many factors I can't control - let's be honest - real change is only going to come through high level government policies. (green new deal, please!) Green guilt is heavy and designed to make us individuals feel bad instead of take action. So even small changes and acts of sustainability add to a collective spirit of doing something different. That's why this project genuinely matters to me.
You can climb a fence while protesting with the sunrise movement or dismantling the patriarchy.
Why it's Eco-Friendly:
100% post-consumer material
Minimalist packaging is 100% recyclable
Print on demand Pattern
Video instructions - free! access anytime and anywhere
Makes a great gift - giving the gift of an experience is so much more rewarding than just more stuff. It's perfect for the person in your life who enjoys sewing.
TL:DR* The long nerdy science-based story & why reducing single use makes a difference...
*scroll to the bottom for some articles that go into great detail if you want to go down that rabbit hole.
Twenty years ago, I remember reading an article (probably in a Newsweek or WorldWatch magazine) about single use plastic shopping bags and how they were causing malaria in tropical climates. Because they don't bio-degrade, if left outside they become a perfect artificial breeding ground for mosquitos and other insects that carry diseases. Plastic bags are notoriously hard to recycle, they are basically kites that fly away even when trying to dispose of them properly, and a lot of parts of the world don't have the infrastructure to contain them properly. And there are ba-jillions of them. So, it was (and still is) a serious public health issue.
That article changed how I thought about the global impact of what we produce, use, and discard. These aren't just issues of waste management or recycling - but of health and disease, of insect populations, and pollutants. Of changing the natural world in a way that is hard to contain to one manufacturing plant or mine or hazmat site - but is getting *everywhere*. And it's a hard challenge to solve because they are just so freaking useful and convenient and "low-resource" aka cheap per unit to make.
And there are always tradeoffs - is the thing that *seems* more environmentally friendly actually better? Shopping bags has always been one of these policy "tradeoff" challenges where there is "whatabout-isms." It's also hard to measure the full supply chain and end-use impacts, so we end up with research that only measures parts of the life cycle.
One of the challenges that comes up in the scientific research, is that re-usable bags made from organic cotton have to be used thousands of times to match the environmental costs of creating single use plastic. The naysayers say a cotton tote is worse. I love to understand "unintended consequences" and strongly believe in data driven decisions even when they don't match our perceptions - but this argument has never fully made sense to me.
So I dug deeper. The reason it doesn't click is that many of these studies *don't* measure the post-use environmental costs of the items or the other externalities caused by plastic (like malaria, pollutants, toxins, damage to wildlife) that the biodegradable options don't cause, or cause less. For example - a plastic bag in a lake or ocean does damage differently than an organic cotton tote. But that isn't always measured. They also don't measure the impacts of renewable vs. non-renewable resources. Oil extraction is different from growing cotton, but many of these studies consider them as equivalencies. This kind of reasoning and research can go round and round and round ending up with no meaningful policy changes.
Twenty years later, plastic bags are still terrible. They are terrible on so many levels. Luckily there *are* some policies happening to change consumer usage, like bag taxes. And frankly, buying new cotton *is* also environmentally damaging.
As I've been learning about postconsumer textiles, I found out that pillowcases are one of the harder things to upcycle or sell at thrift stores. It's a smaller piece of textile, it may not have a matching pair, it's made out of mixed fibers, and it may have some distress.
So... what's the best of both worlds? Using what's already here. This is why I designed the upcycled pillowcase shopping bag kits. We make sure to pick the best pillowcases. They may have a rough corner or thinning, but that doesn't prevent them from becoming a bag. These bags beat the environmental odds by being re-usable, non-virgin, and made with love.
Research if you like that kind of thing:
From birth to ban: A history of the plastic shopping bag (unep.org)
How Single Use Plastics Hurt Our Oceans and Warm Our Planet (pbs.org)
Plastic, Paper or Cotton: Which Shopping Bag is Best? – State of the Planet (columbia.edu)