Kelly just brought me an Onya bread bag ($19.95 at Onyalife.com) to try and help minimise the quantity of bread we buy in plastic bags.

It’s funny, but once I started researching ways to reduce our plastic usage, I quickly became aware of the huge number of businesses now trying to leverage off of this potential market.
Trying to sell you even more stuff to help you use less stuff.

From metal straws to bamboo toothbrushes to keep-cups to aluminium drink bottles to glass food containers to wooden sporks.
All beautifully presented to make you want one…you know, just to make your own life beautifull too. And to signal to others (because a lot of this stuff is used in social situations) that you are doing your bit to save the planet.

Its easy to fall into the trap of going out and buying a whole heap of this ‘environmentally friendly’ merchandise to displace your nasty, evil existing plastic stuff that (ironically) you then end up throwing out to make room.

So it’s tricky. There is definitely an increasing awareness of the need to reduce our plastic consumption. And there are some really neat products that do just that.

I guess its a case of transitioning to rather than replacing with alternatives. There is no reason you can’t use your existing Tupperware containers for food storage until they are at the end of their usable life.
Or even re-using your current disposable plastic drink bottle, until it fails.

You get the idea. The main thing is to really work on ways to stop purchasing new disposable plastics and to use existing solutions whenever possible.

Back to the bread bag. In this case we don’t have an existing bread container, and I have been trying to switch from the plastic shrouded breads from the supermarkets.

And it works really well. I just take the bag with me to the bakery and they pop the loaf (unsliced or sliced) straight into it.

As you have probably noted, 20 bucks is not cheap….it’s just a bag for bread after all. But these things are well made with a double lining so you can pull the inner one through to clean after use. Each bag is made from 10 recycled plastic drink bottles and at the end of its life it is 100% recyclable.

The hope is it will stop me buying innumerable loaves of bread in single use plastic packaging from this point forth.