Earth Day – Create Your Own Re-Usable Shopping Bag

Replacing your plastic bags with reusable fabric bags is the perfect Earth Day craft project.  Since it can take up to one thousand years for a single bag to break down this project really can make a huge difference.  Simply purchase inexpensive fabric canvass bags, and allow your children to create their very own designs with stamps, fabric pens or paint.  Each child’s bag will cut down on excess garbage in the landfills while sporting their fantastic art work.  Have each child create multiple bags and soon enough you’ll have a whole gallery of art work that poses multiple purposes. 

Fabric bags can also be a great way to organize toys and other odds and ends that don’t have a place

To find more creative ways to design these reusable bags click here:  http://crafts.kaboose.com/canvas-grocery-tote.html

Plastic bag facts

• Approx. 380 billion plastic bags are used in the United States every year. That’s more than 1,200 bags per US resident, per year.
• An estimated 12 million barrels of oil is required to make that many plastic bags.
• Only 1 to 2% of plastic bags in the USA end up getting recycled.
• Plastic bags are often mistakenly ingested by animals, clogging their intestines which results in death by starvation. Other animals or birds become entangled in plastic bags and drown or can’t fly as a result.
• Even when they photo-degrade in landfill, the plastic from single-use bags never goes away, and toxic particles can enter the food chain when they are ingested by unsuspecting animals.