Musing on the options for this month's tiny sustainability improvement.

[teffania]

I know a couple of you dear readers have been experimenting with reusable mesh bags. So how has the experiment been working? What are the advantages and disadvantages? What presumed actions have to be part of your weekly habit for using these to work (other than the obvious taking them to  the shop

Comments

[ekkles]

I use a combination of calico bags and polyester bags which fold up to nearly nothing. It does work really well, when I remember them. It helps that every fortnight I do a fairly big shop, so that makes it easier to remember

[teffania]

Sorry, I wasn't being clear. Bags for individual items of fruit/veg, so they don't dry out or escape in the fridge.

We're using a plastic box for some of the fruit, a lettuce crisper, and things like celery and capsicum aren't wrapped. But peas and beans need to be contained, The veggies that don't fit in the crisper like brocoli need to be kept clean, and some of the veggies dry out too much without a bag around them. And others are just difficult to buy without a bag, and that's a lot of bags each year we can probably avoid using without disrupting the weekly routine much.

[kirieldp]

I use fresh mesh bags, which are available in Canberra, made by a collective of women in Indonesia who lost everything in the Tsunami, and fan-bloody tastic. http://www.freshmesh.com.au/

The important thing for me is to have them with me. I need to have a set in the car (in some of the normal cloth carry bags) and some in the office for when I pick veggies up on the way home from work.

(For lettuce, I wrap it in a damp teatowel to keep it lovely and crisp in the fridge.)

[teffania]

Thanks for the recommendation. And this set is very affordable, unlike the ones my last search unearthed which were too expensive to have more than one set.

I think that's the sucess of the green bags actually - they're not fully sustainable, but they are cheap enough to be semi disposable - you can afford to give things back to a friend in them, or use it for a messy job, or buy a new one if you forgot to bring one, or buy enough to have some at work and some at home and some everywhere else. And once you've cheaply established a habbit of taking a bag, then you can think about more expensive, elaborate or sustainably made bags - but at least in the meantime it's reduced useage compared to plastic bags.