What about the custom printed plastic bags? If you like, you can make your own custom bag with the bag printer. It is already 10 years since I first saw recycled and reusable bags in a supermarket. Reusable bag can be printed into all kinds of patterns. Such as custom printed shopping bag, custom printed paper bag and so on. You buy them for a reasonable price, you can use them for a long time and when they break you can exchange them for a new one with no additional cost. A good deal, I would say. But it is 10 years now and we still have an awful lot of plastic bags choking our environment.
One of the reasons is that many shops still offer the “normal” one-use bags for free parallel to the recycled ones, so many people save the penny. Many of the customers that do care and buy the recycled bag regularly forget to bring it to the shop, and when they have a collection of 10 recycled bags at home they just don’t care anymore and take the ones that are for free.
Many shops don’t even have the alternative and provide only one-use bags. In fact, my experience shows that in small stores a little conflict takes place when I try to explain to the person behind the counter that I don’t need a bag.
Some people have been thinking about this and have taken action to fight the plastic bag problem:
Bag printing is really a fashionable trend for youth. Do you want to make you own bag prints? I have heard about these already but they are now spreading fast in the market. Spain is the first plastic bag producer in Europe and it will forbid non biodegradable plastic bags by 2010, so the whole industry is rushing to adapt to the new situation.
A German Supermarket offers now reusable compostable plastic bags. Alternative to these they offer recycled plastic bags, which cost a quarter of the compostable ones. Still, it is a start. Interesting about this bag in particular is the material it is composed of. “Ecovio” is a blend between a biopolymer made of corn starch and a polymer made petrol.