Greensacks Fruit and Vegie bags 5 Pack

Greensacks 5 Pack

• Manufactured in Australia from a lightweight, strong and durable fabric
• Machine washable
• Carries up to 3 kg of produce
• Measures approximately 30cm x 40cm
• Secured by knotting the top edge
• 5 sacks per pack
• Australian and New Zealand Patents Applied For

The idea for the development of greensacks came from a desire to reduce the use of plastic bags and other non-recyclable packaging in our community. Greensacks' aim is to develop a range of reusable produce bags for use in everyday life.

Greensacks' first product is a ‘fruit & vegie sack’ - a machine washable bag to replace the single use plastic option.

About  Plastic

Speaking of which, the disposable plastic shopping bag was introduced in 1977. They were first used in department stores, then soon after by supermarket chains in the early 1980s. The rise in use has been meteoric - unfortunately. Here’s some food for thought.

From Planet Ark

• plastic bags add an estimated $100 million a year to Australia’s grocery bills
• over 200,000 plastic check-out bags are dumped in landfills every hour
• at least 80 million plastic bags end up as litter on our beaches, streets and parks
• plastic bags can take between 15 and 1000 years to break down in the environment

From noplasticbags.org.au

• Australians use over 10 million plastic bags a day

From me

• If every Australian household used 5 new plastic bags for their fruits and vegies each week for a year, we would be adding 2,217 million bags to landfill annually

We don’t have to use plastic grocery bags -
make the change and live green !

Made of 100% polyester

Yes, Greensacks know this will upset some people. They also know that our product is not truly green, like most of the green checkout shopping bags available on the market.

When Greensacks first started developing the fruit & vegie sack, they spent many hours on Google researching what fabric options they could use, including ones made of renewable materials. In the end, the latter search all became too hard and the end result was going to be too costly for the consumer’s hip pocket.

In the Google maze, Greensacks also began to lose sight of what my primary purpose was, “to provide an alternative to the small plastic bag used for fruits & vegetables with the aim of eliminating as MANY as possible.” The only way of achieving this was by offering an affordable product. At the time, it was not going to be possible using a renewable fibre. They had to choose between polyester/affordable/reaching more people or renewable/expensive/less people. The rest is history.

Greensacks haven’t given up on the fully “green” product though!! That’s for down the track.

Lifespan

Greensacks cannot categorically say how long greensacks’ fruit & vegie sacks will last because they have no history! Let’s be honest. What they can say though, is that they’ve done everything to create a product which will be long lasting. Greensacks certainly didn’t want to produce something which was going to make the planet worse off than what it is now.

A great deal of thought went into the type of fabric to be used (weight, strength, durability, washability, longevity) and the stitches used (strong, neat, secure, flexible) to maximize the product’s lifespan. As an aside, we know of a bag made with similar fabric which is still going strong after 5 years of weekly use.

If the care instructions are followed (no sharp objects) then there is no reason why our sacks won’t keep on keeping on. If by chance they do get snagged on something sharp and get a hole, the beauty of the net fabric is that it won’t run and cause a bigger hole. The sacks can still be used as normal.

We know our sacks are not the 'perfect' solution but it’s better than the current alternative. Here's food for thought:

• 1 household uses 5 new plastic bags per week - that’s 260 annually
• multiply this by the number of Australian households in 2006 (latest ABS data) - 260 x 8.53 million = 2,218 million
• multiply this by 10 years = 22,180 million
• this is the possible number of small plastic bags we could eliminate from Australian landfill over a 10 year period by using a reusable option