Green Cotton

We all know one of the easiest and simplest ways to go “green” is to bring reusable bags to the grocery store. Did you do this the last time you went to the store? Maybe not. If you are like me, you might have forgotten to slip one in your bag for the last minute errand you did not anticipate. With the best of intentions, it is a lot harder to execute this simple act on a consistent basis.

Yet, despite the challenges, many are happily succeeding at this all-important change in behavior (just check out your local Trader Joes, Food Coop, Farmers Market, or Whole Foods for some indication). If the market provides any clues as well, with more than several dozen reusable bag companies on the market, demand is strong and growing. This is great! Indeed, let’s celebrate these efforts, while also recognizing we can still do more.

At the same time, it’s interesting to look at companies and organizations that are taking this simple green grocery bag step a little further. Recognizing the growing trend, why not push the envelope and see how much impact one can achieve from a single re-usable bag? That is exactly what Laura Bush asked when she started Feedprojects.org 3 years ago in 2006 with her debut bag FEED 1.

Three years have passed since FEED1 and to their credit, the bags are now stocked at nearly every Whole Foods in the country along with several other major chains. In addition to raising $4million dollars through FEED bags (donated to the World  Food Progam (WFP), the bags seem to have  increased interest in global hunger alleviation, while also fomenting the demand for reusable bags.

So what are these bags all about?

Unlike traditional “fair trade” bags, which benefit artisans in developing countries at point of purchase in those countries, Feed bags benefit people in developing countries at the US checkout line (eg once they are purchased here). As an example, the FEED 1 Bag sells for approximately $30 dollars and with that, supposedly provides 100 meals to hungry children in Rwanda. By the end of 2007, FEED raised donations for the World Food Program (WFP) to feed over 37,500 hungry children in school for one year. In 2008, FEED Projects various partnerships will lead to over $4 million for WFP school feeding.

The problems being address will clearly take some time to solve, but one step at a time, each bag counts.  According to Feedprojects.org, “hunger and malnutrition kill more people than AIDS, malaria, and TB combined. Almost 400 million children around the world go to bed hungry every night. In fact, every five seconds a child dies because he or she is hungry.”

While it is true that no single solution will solve global malnutrition, what’s not to like about a simple campaign supporting a simple product that raises awareness about global malnutrition while helping to solving it…AND reducing plastic grocery bag use (remember it takes up to 1,000 years for one bag to decompose in a landfill).

In addition to the hunger impact, all FEED products are made as eco-friendly and fairly as possible. The bags are produced with high-quality, 100% organic cotton and natural burlap. FEED works with only audited and certified fair labor facilities.

Images courtesy of http://www.feedprojects.org/content.asp?tid=16.

Bergdorf Goodman and Rugby by Ralph Lauren have joined in the fun, too. Each of these retailers collaborated to create a version of the FEED Bag.

Bergdorf’s FEED 2 Bag (featured above) supports the Kenyan community as it was handcrafted by a group of deaf Kenyans.  Furthermore, each bag purchased feeds 2 hungry Kenyan school children for an entire year.

The Rugby FEED Bag gives money to The Feed Foundation to support student activists who go abroad to join the force in combating hunger around the world.

Bobbi Brown and Lauren Bush recently collaborated to create a FEED makeup bag that will benefit disadvantaged women who have joined the UN’s food for work program.

So check it out, and see what you can do next time you bring your re-usable to the store. Why not make it an act of social impact as well. Can’t hurt, right?

To see  and read more on FEED’s ever-expanding array of bag selections, visit the Feed Foundation.

Photos courtesy of Feed Projects

By Morgan Laske and Shana Yansen

Now that the weather is warming up, now matter where you are you are likely spending a bit more time outdoors. Hopefully that means more time on your bike as well. For those of you in the Cambridge/ Boston area, the Alewife Bicycle parking lot is filling up and cyclists are beginning to crow the bike path (good cause for celebration indeed).

When it comes to fashion and cycling however, the trends mostly congregate around the advanced cyclists with high tech gear, but for the daily commuter or grocery shopper, little seems to hit the market.

That is until Detours came out with its recycled juice box pannier. Recycled candy wrapper and juice box handbags are hot this year, and the majority of which not only have a great environmental story but also are handmade and also have a positive social impact as well.

Check out Detours Toocan juice box pannier and you will be sure to draw a crowd on your commute or errand, not only admiring your cutting edge pannier but also hopefully to inspiring other would-be-cyclists to get on their bikes and grocery shop the cool way. I could not find this bag on the Detours website but I did find it on gearapalooza. I’ve been using a Detours Toocan for many months now for grocery shopping and just love it. The design is incredibly simple, sturdy, functional and stylish. Let me know if you have other panniers you like out there.

BoB’s 100 % eco-friendly clothing hangers offer a refreshing alternative to the ubiquitous plastic hangers that most of us buy (or accumulate through purchases), which are made from toxic and difficult to degrade polystyrene or polycarbonate materials.

Of the 8 billion hangers purchased every year, a mere 15% of hangers are recycled after use. That accumulates into enough waste to fill the entire Empire State Building four times, every single year! BoB provides an easy alternative that can do wonders for reducing that waste, not to mention toxic build-up.

“BoB”, the name of this innovative new environmentally friendly hanger system, stands for Bottle “Object” Bottle. As the name suggests, this is how one puts the hanger to use. Simply buy the holder and use two plastic bottles of any type to complete the hanger (a perfect way to recycle plastic that otherwise would be piling up landfills anyway!).

Designed by Joan Nadal, the hanger system reuses P.E.T. bottles by integrating them into the hanger system as part of the practical and lightweight clothing hanger. This product is meant to help reduce waste and increase recycling, while also serving as a reminder that we continually need to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

Joan Nadal’s design reduces energy use during production and eliminates use of toxic substances. The fact that BoB hangers come as one lightweight pieces of cardboard reduces the carbon footprint of transportation, and because the consumer constructs this object themselves, this process uses no energy, and BoB’s hangers come with no packaging, which is often a huge waste consideration.

Check out the short video on BoB’s website http://www.bobhanger.com/how the hanger can be put together, and taken apart to be reused again somewhere else:

Primary sources: TreeHugger and BoB’s website.