A Hundred Million – What Would You Do With It?

Go ahead, dream big. One hundred million one dollar bills – all yours. Dumped on you like you were buried in a landfill. Swimming in it. Is that a lot? Too much for you to handle? How would you like to have that problem?

Oh, geez. I’m mistaken. It’s not one dollar bills that you’re being inundated with, but plastic bags. Sorry. A bit more boring and a damn nuisance. But, that’s the quantity that will not be created or used thanks to one small, but significant change that Whole Foods Market (WFM) recently announced.

Across the nation, throughout their 270 and growing stores, taking your natural groceries home in a plastic bag will no longer be even option. And for those of you playing the home game version of “Can Juicing Joe Stump His Especially Savvy Juicing Audience?” the number of plastic bags not being dumped into garbage dumps, clogging up waterways and not taking up a seriously large footprint in the environment: 100 Million plastic bags.

The better option, not so ironically provided by Whole Foods Market, for a paltry 99 cents, is what is being marketed under the name “Better Bag”, a plastic bag that can be used repeatedly, including during its creation, before it get to your hands: each made from recycled bottles. Turning a problem into a solution.

Even more crafty and borderline ingenious is a movement where people are collecting said, similar plastic bags and creating one of a kind apparel and accessories.

What they do is take loads of the bags, place them between wax paper (I believe, but don’t quote me), and Iron it down, melting and melding several plastic bags into surprisingly strong (and waterproof) strips of plastic. Then those strips are sewn together to create all sorts of useful things. I believe there are several videos on YouTube showing demonstration – which if you are interested, just comment below, and I’ll track them down for you. Here’s the one I was thinking of when I wrote this..

<<Click on the picture, to go to the video… >>

plastic bag recycling - messenger bag

I never would have thought of that. Not to mention, there are people who are taking what most people would consider garbage, and actually selling their creations for cash. How cool is that?

Juicing Joe