Monday Mix-up - Why, and how, to use re-usable shopping bags

They jokingly call the plastic shopping our "national flower". It's not a very funny joke actually, when you think of all the havoc it wreaks on our environment. If you are anywhere near a river in Johannesburg, those bags are literally hanging off trees lining the rivers, by the thousands. I'm not exaggerating. It's not just ugly, it's killing our wildlife and poisoning our environment.

It boggles my brain that someone can buy a chocolate bar and ask for a shopping bag to put it in. Yet that's what people do. Why can't they carry it in their hand? Or put it in a pocket, or their handbag? People just seem to have NO idea the damage they are eventually going to do to the environment by purchasing that pointless bag. Plastic doesn't biodegrade. Once it's made, it's here to stay. Even if you use it as a rubbish bag, it's still going to be around the next several hundred years. I'm only talking about one bag. People buy those things by the thousands.

This is how quickly they add up. Now multiply that by millions... Am I the only person who finds that thought really scary? Once I became aware of the damage I was doing to the environment by buying them, I made a decision a few years back that I was no longer going to. I was going to use my own bags. It was a bit of a slow process getting it right!

For weeks I would either forget them on the dining room table, after purposefully taking them out for shopping, or I'd forget altogether to take them out, or I'd put them in the car and then only remember them at the till! It takes a while to form a habit. I think it takes longer when you aren't that driven to help the habit form. At the time I decided to take my own bags I will still pretty uninformed about the environment so, while I really wanted to be good about it, I wasn't as focused as I could have been.

That's changed thank goodness! These days I carry my bags with me everywhere. They are now old and rather ratty, very well travelled bags and they are made up of all sorts. Any bag I find, or am given gets turned into a shopping bag if it suits the purpose! I also carry a very large handbag for the rare days when I don't have a shopping bag handy. Anything small gets thrown in there. GLM and I have been known to walk through a shopping centre balancing piles of things in our arms, just to avoid having to buy bags and add more plastic to the world. Bless her heart, she never complains;)

This is something very small that you can do to help ease the pressure on our planet just a bit. Set an example. Carry your reusable bags with pride. Flaunt them for all the world to see when you get to the till. If it makes the person in front of you just A LITTLE bit guilty, and they end up not buying a bag, so much the better!

Here are some tips to help you get the shopping bag thing right:

• Make sure you leave home with enough bags: I often used to make the mistake of only taking 2 bags and then running out of space and having to buy 2 or 3. Rather have more than less. Take at least 5 of them with.
• Keep the bags in the car, not the house: If you keep them in the house, guaranteed you will forget them. I seem to have formed enough of a habit now that I grab them from the kitchen cupboard almost without thinking, but, while you are getting into the habit, keep them in the car!
• Keep bags in ALL your cars: Okay, most people don't have more than 2;) But just in case! That way, if you are out in your spouse's car and need to buy something, you aren't forced to buy a bag.
• After you unpack your shopping, put the bags BACK in the car: It's amazing, but, in the this crazy, busy world, our heads are so full of things to do that you can forget from one minute to the next, what you had planned to do. That's why we've got a thing in our house. If you say, "I MUST do such and such before we go," we both say, "Do it NOW!" Because if we don't, we'll forget for sure. So, don't even hesitate, unpack, and head straight to the car, do not pass begin, do not collect $200;)
• Have bags for different things: Packing meat with veggies just isn't going to go down well. You especially don't want meat packed in a thin, material bag. So make sure you have bags that suit the various things you are buying.
• Finally, don't forget to wash the bags now and then: They gather lots of bacteria over the weeks and you ARE carrying food.

There you go! Easy as pie:)