BYOB ~ Bring Your Own Bag

We're in Vancouver, Canada, this week on vacation, and we're having a great time kickin around like the locals.  Vancouver is a major foodie town, so we do lots of shopping and cooking while we're here.

This is the shopping bag I purchased today at Caper's Market -- part of the Whole Foods chain -- on Robson Street in Vancouver.  The bag looks white in the photo, but it's actually a very pale green, and the artwork is by Sheryl Crow.

A few years ago, I started buying reusable shopping bags as souvenirs when I travel.  I have them in a variety of materials, including washable cotton and hemp, basic plastic-with-a-handle style (like the Macy's bags of my childhood), Trader Joe's terrific wine carrier that holds six bottles, and the ultra versatile waterproof bags made from recycled plastic water bottles.

This style is my personal favorite:  it's sturdy, it stands up for easy loading and unloading, and it folds flat for storage.  It weighs almost nothing tucked into a suitcase, and it's perfect for garage sales, farmer's markets, flea markets, and used book stores.  I always have a few waterproof bags in my car for muddy shoes, wet beach towels, six-packs of bedding plants, and all the other messy/leaky/drippy things that come along.

 

 

Top 10 reasons to Bag the Wrap and use "A Better Bag" instead:
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1. Americans throw away 25% more trash between Thanksgiving and New Year's.
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2. A Better Bag is made of 80% post-consumer recycled PET bottles, saving them from going into the trash and landfills.
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3. In the U.S. alone, about 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away each year (and only 0.6 % of them are recycled).
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4. Extra waste during the holidays amounts to 25 million tons of garbage.
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5. Using A Better Bag can save millions of single-use bags (and wrapping paper!) from going to the landfill.
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6. It's a great-looking, cool, eco-friendly way to wrap gifts.
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7. A Better Bag can be used and re-used thousands of times.
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8. Whole Foods Market and Sheryl Crow teamed up to create a custom design for A Better Bag to benefit the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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9. If every family wrapped just 3 presents in re-used materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.
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10. Double the giving: It's actually a gift that holds another gift which gives and gives again, and says you care even more!