An average American family uses nearly 1,500 plastic grocery bags annually, meaning that the total US population uses over 102 billion plastic bags a year. These plastic bags are thrown away after a single use.
And only 0.6 percent of them are recycled. Rest goes to landfills and oceans, which eventually leads to the pollution threating environment and life. Plastic bags take some 1,000 years to decompose while recycling consumes lots of water and petroleum.
The optimal solution to deal with this problem is to reuse the plastic bags as possible. It will keep the plastic waste percentage lower in landfills.
Here we have come up with some amazing ideas to recycle your plastic bags for your home and arts.
1. Use Them to Protect Your Fruits:
Do you have some fruit trees in your garden? In this scenario, a plastic bag can be useful for you in many ways. You can tie a plastic bag around the branch when the ripe fruits are about the fall. It will catch your fruit and avoid them hitting on the ground. Besides, it will protect your fruits from bug bites and frost damage.
2. Make a Rope Out of Them:
You can make a durable and fancy rope out of the plethora of discard plastic grocery bags at your home. All you need to follow these simple steps:
- Cut your bags into long strips.
- Tie the strips together at one end.
- Wrap the strips around something solid, for example a back to the chair or table legs. It will hold the strips while you braid.
- Start braiding the strips together.
- After your final braiding, tie the end knot too.
3. Use Them to Polish Your Furniture:
Plastic bags come handy if you don’t have gloves while applying waxes, creams or polishes to the furniture. Just wrap them around your hand and secure around the wrists for a perfect makeshift. You can use more than one plastic bag to do the polishing firmly on the surface.
4. Protect Your Paint and Paint Brushes:
Paint tends to dry out fast. A leftover on your paintbrush can spoil them. Your plastic bag can help you. Place your plastic bag over the top before resealing the can with the lid. It will prevent any dry paint flakes on the lid falling into the liquid. Use plastic bag to cover the paintbrushes if you want a break from painting for a while.
5. Weave a Bag or Basket From Plastic Bags:
If you are good at weaving, there is an exciting way to use them. You can weave a bag using the breaded ropes (like the second point in this blog). Or a cool and more durable shopping bag is possible with the weaving of these breaded ropes.
6. Stuff Your Cushions, Pillows and Punching Bags:
Stuff your cushions, pillows and punching bags with the plastic bags to give them a new life. It is also a clever way to make a house training pet pillow by stuffing an old pillow case tightly with plastic bags.
7. As Your Gardening Knee Pads:
One more fantastic idea to use plastic bag in gardening—cut the bottom of two plastic bags and slip them over your legs to get a waterproof kneepads. It will protect your knees from getting dump or muddy. Besides, it will minimize the use of your expensive kneepads every now and then.
8. Protect Your Car’s Side View Mirrors from Being Frosted:
Avoid getting frost on your car’s side mirrors while you leave them outside for longer in colder months. In this way, you don’t need to scrape off ice later. Just remove the bags and place them in the glove compartment ready for next time.
So, these are some simple ways to reuse your grocery plastic bags, instead of throwing them in the bins after a single use.
Spread such ideas to reuse plastic grocery bags to more people so that our landfills can have less burden of the waste.
