Mesh produce bags review and giveaway
UPDATE: The winner of the mesh produce bags is Lisa Atherton Smith, who commented on Green Garbage Project’s Facebook page,
“I would love bags like this. My kitchen tip-Instead of buying cleanser or soft scrub clean your sink with a mixture of half borax and half baking soda. Both come in cardboard boxes.Store and sprinkle it out of a repurposed parm. cheese container.”
I was wandering through my local Fred Meyer last night, trying to find a product I could use as a giveaway this week. In the produce section, I stumbled across these neat Earthwise mesh produce bags. I picked up a set for me and a set to be used as my giveaway this week.
Then I got the bags home. First, let me say they are cool. I really like them, they are durable, they can easily replace single-use plastic produce bags from the grocery store, and you can wash your produce directly in the bag. I put several varieties of produce in the bags and carried them around, ran them under the faucet, and was very pleased.
What I am not pleased about, however, is the packaging. When I grabbed these in the store, I assumed (and we all know where that gets a person) they were packaged on a cardboard recyclable tag. Nope. Turns out that the EarthWise company chose to attach their mesh bags to a plastic tag instead. Plastic! When the very point of the company is to reduce our plastic use in the first place!
Discovering this, I sent the company the following letter (feel free to use part or all of my verbage in your own letters to companies that greenwash their products):
Hi there,
I recently invested in several sets of your “Reusable mesh produce sacks” from my local Fred Meyer. I plan to use some of these bags for me, and others I will give away on my blog www.greengarbageproject.com This blog’s purpose is to track my efforts to reduce my personal “trash footprint” to its very bare minimum. As such, while I find your bags to be an extremely useful product, I am writing to ask about your packaging.
The bags came attached with a stretchy cord to a tag. In the store, I was under the impression that this tag was cardboard, and therefore recyclable. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it appears as if the tag you use is actually plastic. This choice of packaging disappoints me, and I’m left feeling as if I purchased a “greenwashed” as opposed to truly green product.
Are you able to tell me what the cording and tag are made of? I’m hoping, at the very least, that the plastic is recyclable. I will post your answer on my blog.
I urge you to consider using earth-friendly packaging in the future, to truly make your product “earthwise.”
Sincerely,
Amy Korst
As soon as I get a response, I’ll post an update here.
Update: Here’s the response I received from the company:
Hi Amy,
I understand your concern, however, given that the produce environment is a wet environment we were unable to use paper to hold the product in place. The bag is designed to significantly reduce single use plastic bag usage over its lifetime, however, plastic products are ubiquitous in our world and a reusable bag cannot remove the need for all plastic products.
We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the needs for plastic and will always strive to find ways to minimize our use of it. In the meantime, however, we sometimes have to utilize the material in order to deliver our environmentally conscientious products to the marketplace.
Given your very legitimate concern about the recyclability of the plastic, as well as other similar inquiries received since our launch, we are sending a sample of the plastic card to Waste Management in order to determine what number it may be recycled at on the plastics scale. Once we have this information we will forward to you.
In addition, when we print a new batch of the stock cards we will include the recycle symbol and plastics number directly on the card in order to encourage recycling by consumers in the future.
With thanks for your continued environmental support
Earthwise Bags
Hmmm. I don’t buy it, because about two days after I sent my email, I wandered into Whole Foods and found these mesh produce bags by Blue Avocado.
They were hanging in the produce section and packaged using only cardboard. Somehow, all the moisture in the air wasn’t causing the bags to disinegrate on the spot. Looks to me like the Earthwise company needed to do a little more R&D before launching their product.
Nevertheless, buying or making mesh produce bags to avoid the throwaway plastic ones is still a good idea.
In the meantime, I will certainly add these mesh bags to my collection. I’ll also give away a set of three mesh bags, considering that 3 reusable bags should save a lot of resources – meaning one small plastic tag might make up for itself in saved plastic bags.
If you want to be entered for these bags, leave a comment here or on my Facebook page telling me what you are doing to reduce trash in the kitchen. If it’s something I haven’t thought of, I’ll enter your name twice.
If you don’t happen to win, but you’d like to purchase your own mesh produce bags, there are many stores on Etsy that sell these bags for a reasonable price. There are also tons of patterns online, if you’re interested. On Etsy or when searching for a pattern, use the words “mesh produce bags.”
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Reducing our “cookprint” has been an ongoing project for our household (and we’re still learning). We began with the logical stuff – recycling, reusing, repurposing, composting, and avoiding products and foods packaged in unrecyclable materials (what we like to call “conscious consumerism”. Growing our own food and making what we couldn’t grow was the next logical step. We now grow a wide variety of fruits and veggies on our little urban homestead and make our own bread products (bread, rolls, pizza crust, breadcrumbs) among other things. We also ditched store bought cleaning products and disposables like napkins and sponges and when our reusable cloths and napkins are worn out they’re compostable. In addition we try to source products locally that we can purchase with little to no packaging at all including handmade soaps from a small local farm and fruits and veg from the local farmers markets. Often these vendors are happy to sell you their wares unpackaged if you ask nicely.
The easiest change I’ve made in the kitchen is to use all cloth rags, instead of paper towels & napkins. We keep a little bowl on the counter for fruit, veggie & coffee scraps that get put into the composter each night. And now we’ll have to add a second bowl for our other food scraps- since Salem will start curbside composting July 1! I’m so excited about that.
Amy, I love you letter! To reduce kitchen waste, we have been composting, making flavored water ourselves and putting it in bottles we have saved (rather than buying a new bottle each time). I am buying most produce without the plastic bag (and the times I do use one, I always try to reuse it for something), but they would be nice to use for things like green beans, brussel sprouts and other small things.
…and, I forgot to add to my last post: We save all our meat/poultry bones and then when I have a large container full I boil them for a couple days in some water.
Did you know if you boil chicken bones in water and apple cider vinegar for a couple days the bones crumble and you can mash them up and feed them to your dogs.
I make sure they are all soft & crumbly before I do, so it is kind of messy. However, boiling the bones like this extracts a lot of the marrow, which is good for the dogs, and there is usually a little meat left over on the bones as well. I mash the whole thing up and add some rice cereal (or left over rice), and I often throw in some old carrots that we might have while the mixture is cooking (our dogs love carrots).
I add this mixture to their regular kibble. They love it, it makes the kibble go farther, and it is something that I would have probably thrown in the trash otherwise.
Just wanted to add that to the reduce kitchen waste post.
Thanks!
Two things — both I guess fairly obvious to folks who read this blog. After years to recycling, we finally started composting last summer. It is amazing how much ‘food waste’ we previously tossed. And boy are we going to have some nice dirt once this gets tilled in.
Second — we started making our own pizza instead of buying it/having it delivered. Not only is it cheaper and tastes better — but the boxes were not recyclable around here because of the grease, etc. So we have removed that whole stream of non-recyclable boxes, little plastic stands, labels, car emissions, etc. yeah!
My husband and I are right now moving into our first house. This is very exciting for several reasons, one of which is our first back yard, in which we will begin our first compost heap. We will finally be able to divert food scraps out of the garbage and into a composting area! I think I’m unreasonably excited about this.
Another little thing I would do is turn boxes (especially cereal boxes or granola bar boxes) inside-out to make mailers. But I don’t send enough mail to keep up with my love of cereal.
What a fantastic site and a fantastic project!
I have a set of these very bags and I absolutely LOVE them! I don’t remember the packaging as I bought them a few years ago but I am SOOOO glad that I’m not the only person who writes letters every time they see something like that! I call it being a “little green thorn”. You Go Girl!!!
Can’t wait to check out the rest of your site!