No more grocery bags!

I’m very proud of myself.  I realized yesterday that for the past THREE times I’ve gone to do the Major Family Grocery Shopping, I’ve gotten in and out without using a single disposable grocery bag.  Now that I’ve got an official “stash” that I keep in my car, I can bag more groceries than we ever need.  It’s cool. (Two disclaimers: one, all the photos in this post are taken from ReusableBags.com –I didn’t have the energy to photograph my own actual stash…two, I don’t intend this to be a commercial for what happens to be my favorite reusable-shopping-and-lunch-bag website; you can find these products or others like them pretty much anywhere you look.  My experiences with this crew have been excellent, though!)

So first there’s the little Stuff Sack–it’s a smallish hemp drawstring bag that I really didn’t need but bought anyway, because ReusableBags.com gave me a gift certificate in honor of being their 200,000th customer.  (I figured that gave me a little bit of Frivolous License, you know?) I use this bag to house all my other “regular” grocery shopping bags, and somehow it’s at last become habit to grabit on my way into the store. Usually.

In the little stuffsack I have five other bags: one giant string bag (holds all the cereals, crackers, lighter weight stuff that takes up a lot of room. This thing expands till forever.), one smaller heavier duty string bag (holds smaller but slightly heavier things, like fruits and veggies or cheese. Pasta.  Rice.  The pound of mushrooms I always seem to come home with.), and then my two collapsible Acme bags–one with long tote bag type handles, made of 100% recyclable material, and one of their standard “workhorse” bags–these are sturdy suckers, they take the bottles and cans I still haven’t managed to eradicate from our shopping ventures…

I love love love these super-compact bags–I have the two in my grocery stash, and I always carry two more in my purse; they are so tiny that they take up almost no room, and they are incredibly easy to open and then re-collapse.  And when I carry them with me, I’m much more likely to remember at the drugstore or fabric store or wherever I happen to be and pull them out.  So between the four bags in my stuff-sack and the two I schlep with me in my purse, and the fact that one string bag will hold 3 or 4 paper bags worth of Stuff, I have yet to run out at the store, even on our mongo big shopping trips. 

There are so many areas of greenness where I just sort of stink at it…this is probably the one aspect of my life where I feel I can say “yes! I’ve truly changed my ways!”–and it gives me hope for the other stuff, like the paper towels and too many lights on in the house and never ever biking anywhere…

Wonder which new greenness thing I should try to tackle in 2010? I should start thinking about it now…time is running short…