Doing our part for the environment

Kevin and I not the most environmentally friendly people on this planet. Yes, we do care about the environment but we do not go out of our way to be a tree hugger (nothing wrong with that ;P) nor would we pay more to buy 'environmentally friendly' products. I feel that we are a good representation of a major chunk of the general public. Yes, we think that protecting our environment is important and yes, we do recycle our trash. However, that's about as far as we will go without finding it to be a hassle or 'disrupting' our daily lives.

This is one of the cabinets in our kitchen. We know that throwing away plastic bags are really really bad. Therefore, to feel better, we would just stuff it in the cabinets every time we come home from the grocery store or shopping. We do reuse them as trash bags. See, we even bought the Ikea plastic bag holder that I think is in about 80% of all Malaysian households :P So why are there still so many plastic bags? The problem is, we collect more plastic bags compared to amount we need to use as trash bags. Each time we go out grocery shopping, we would take home at least 8-10 bags. Our little plastic bag holder is so stuffed with plastic bags that we don't bother to put any in there anymore! Hahaha.

Sooo, we decided that this must come to an end. We are just too lazy to bring all those plastic bags to the recycling center all the time. Today, we went out to get some reusable grocery bags from ShopRite. You can pretty much get it anywhere but we happen to be in ShopRite, so we bought it from there. It's 99 cents for one and they come in a variety of designs.

The bags are very deep and wide. It's made from some recyclable woven material and it's really strong too. We bought 4 bags just to try them out. We only managed to use two cause we didn't get much groceries today. The bags even comes with a hard base board so that the bags can stand up rigid when you want to use them.

This is what we bought today. We could have actually fitted all that into one bag but we didn't want to over do it (after all, we had four empty bags). All of that went into two bags, with loads of room to spare. If we were to use the regular plastic grocery bags, we would have used at least four plastic bags. This is because the oil, oranges and orange juice would be too heavy and we would need to double bag it. Another four plastic bags to join our plastic bag cemetery in the bottom cabinet, at the far end of the kitchen :P

At the checkout counter, we found out something that made our day. Every time we use reusable grocery bags instead of the regular plastic bags, ShopRite gives us a cash rebate of 5cents per bag. So, come to think of it, those reusable grocery bags eventually will pay for itself in the long run. Isn't that great? We get to do our bit for the environment and technically, we are not losing any money because of it. In fact, we might end up saving money in the future. I'm glad we decided to start using reusable grocery bags. Maybe you guys should too? :D