Yakking Green Things

• I'm halfway through The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's a good read and neither dry nor preachy.
  
• Like me, my husband's first career was in academic science. He was a climate researcher (I was a molecular biologist).
  
• I live within a mile of the Pacific ocean. I see plastic bags floating next to the kids playing in the surf. You can't walk on the beach without stepping on someone's cigarette butt or discarded trash.
  

These are the things that pull me green.

I also live in a part of the country that is staunchly green green green. In some cases, nauseatingly, self-congratulatory, obnoxiously green. In other cases, cute-to-the-point-of-twee green. And in nearly all cases, expensively green. Green is for the wealthy... the well-educated holier-than-thou infinitely-more-chic-than-you elite.

These are the things that make me want to leave ziplock baggies full of compostable dog poop on the lawns of city officials and bicycle-nazis everywhere. So sue me.

Anyway. Thankfully rational thought trumps visceral reaction, and I've been slowly implementing green changes in the way I run my house. Biodegradable detergent, a rag to clean the table instead of paper towels, more diligent recycling... and more. I picked up Sewing Green which is a decent book that covers things found in plenty of other books (Sew and Stow comes to mind) but puts a recycling spin on all of it. This gave me the idea of making sandwich wraps out of PUL (PolyUrethane Laminated fabric) and quilting cotton in order to reduce ziplock bag use. And that got me to thinking about all the other ways in which I use ziplock bags... plastic bags destined for the landfill.

The problem with sewing your own ziplock bags is that for food safety sake, you need to get them very clean between uses. While it's true you can wash and dry PUL on hot repeatedly without problems, it is still a hazard to leave crumbs and moisture in corners of bags. I thought about making 3 sides out of velcro to eliminate corners, but frankly, I thought that would suck. Sewing velcro on things just barely makes it into the "good" column in my list of super powers - that stuff borders on evil in so very many circumstances. And then I had the lightbulb moment - why does a bag need to have corners at all? The sandwich bag companies make them rectangular to maximize use of material, but I don't need to do that. So there it is - I drafted an oval bag shape - no corners for crumbs. E=mc^2 it isn't, but hey, it's free.

It's a fairly small bag. I'm finding all these reusables are pretty bulky to put in a kid's lunchbox, and you're not using these for sandwiches (wraps are much better for that purpose). It holds a reasonable serving of berries or crackers or cookies or whatever. If you want it bigger, print it out at 125% or more.

You can get 2 bags out of a fat quarter of PUL (PolyUrethaneLaminated fabric - used extensively for cloth diapering and hospital settings - tolerated even by most people with chemical sensitivities), a fat quarter of quilting fabric, 4" of velcro and less than a half yard of binding. You can make it without the binding - just sew lining to exterior most of the way around the "mouth" RST, flip and edge stitch the flipping-hole closed - but I like the look of binding better. Anyway, it's a minimal investment of time and materials.