Green Crafting with Ruthie!
Hi!
My name is Ruthie and I will be posting regularly about green crafting for Sew Crafty Houston. I am very excited for this opportunity because eco-friendly living, sustainability and lightening my footstep on the earth are very important values to me.
You may be wondering, what exactly is green crafting? Basically anything that we make, create, or invent that helps reduce our impact on the Earth could be considered a green crafts! Specifically, just like the catchy slogan, green crafting is all about reducing the amount of waste we produce, reusing items before they go to the dump and recycling materials to make cool new crafts!
I will present projects for all these concepts in future posts, but for today I want to start with one of the most obvious and important green crafts there is: the reusable grocery tote!
Reusable grocery bags are great way to reduce the number of plastic bags being produced and disposed of every year. Here are some hard facts about your common, innocent looking grocery bag:
- Production of plastic bags contributes to air pollution and energy consumption
- Four to five trillion plastic bags are manufactured each year
- Americans use over 380 billion polyethylene bags per year
- Americans throw away approximately 100 billion polyethylene bags per year
- Of those 100 billion plastic bags, 1% are recycled
- It takes 1000 years for polyethylene bags to break down
- As polyethylene breaks down, toxic substances leach into the soil and enter the food chain
- Plastic bags are often mistaken as food by marine mammals. 100,000 marine mammals die yearly by eating plastic bags
- Plastic bag choke landfills
- Plastic bags are carried by the wind into forests, ponds, rivers, and lakes
Read more facts at this site.
The good news is that is incredibly easy to prevent all the negative effects of plastic bags just by carrying your own reusable totes! Of course, we all own those $1 Kroger or Whole Foods reusable totes, but sometimes it’s just really difficult to remember to carry it with you. I’ve found it’s at lot easier to remember to carry a tote that you or your friend or child has made or helped make! Not only are you proud to do something great for the Earth, but also proud of the craftiness and beauty of a handmade tote!
If you don’t have enough time or skill to make your own tote, you can buy premade blank totes and embellish them with adorable decorations. In fact, you can do this right at Sew Crafty with our drop-in crafting studio (check out one of ours over to the left!)
If you love to sew, you’re in luck! There are several great websites with tutorials. This adorable tote with pocket by Sew Mama Sew, and this tutorial for a tote made out of an old t-shirt (recycled!) from Instructables are both available for free! Of course you can put “Tote bag tutorial” in the Google box and find hundreds of inventive and instructive sites and blogs.
And if you would like to learn to sew, don’t forget about our sewing classes. In Sewing Bootcamp you actually make a grocery tote out of adorable fabric. Check out our schedule online or give us a call to sign up!
Once you make your tote, use it with pride! Experience the joy of helping the planet while making something handmade and you will understand exactly what green crafting is all about.
Until next time, tread lightly!
Ruthie
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Comments
Love it!! Looking forward to more of these posts!
By Vegan_Noodle on Oct 23, 2009