Stylish reusable bags | Environment | ABC26.com | WGNO-TV

Stylish reusable bags

A company's trying to reduce the number of plastic bags thrown away - and make its customers look good too.

Jackie Tranchida, Metromix

Do you do the grocery shopping in your household?

Well, I read on the Internet an estimated 500 billion plastic bags are tossed a year, and that is a lot of waste. But there's a company in Chicago trying to reduce that number - reusable-bags-dot com . They've got something to replace nearly every use-and-toss item in your daily routine. It's an easy way to do your part, and as an added bonus you won't have to take out the trash as often.

That ticker's moving mighty fast but there's a simple way to slow it down.

"It's something that everybody can end up doing, bring your own bag and that's how we got started."

Vincent got fed up with seeing the streets littered with plastic bags, the average person uses about 500 in a year, and that's when a little light when on, energy saver of course.

This bag folds into this tiny little pouch - you open it up and it's basically the footprint of a plastic shopping bag but you can reuse it thousands of times.

Close, you would have gotten there, another five seconds you would have gotten it done. It's not fair cause you're around these all day and, in fact, you created this. Yes, cause I wanted one that I would actually carry around - so the first one we did was black in this bag, this style and it'll fit in your pocket. Is that a reusable bag in your no, I'm kidding.

In just five years, the website has grown into a place to re-place much of what you use and chuck.

A lot of the store you see now they're all selling the canvas bags, but you guys have taken it one step further like I'd much rather be carrying this cute little bag right here. - Yup.

We offer over, probably about 100 to 120 different styles of reusable shopping bags, we've taken it down to the level of things like reusable produce bags, ours are all logo free.

This way you don't have to wear your eco-cause on your sleeve or your grocery bag, and you can save the earth in style. They use environmentally friendly fabrics whenever possible, and when they can't there's always this...

Eight to ten bottles were recycled to produce this bag.

Reusables are also made from recyclables, like juice boxes and rice bags...

And on the much higher end, they have this guy. It's a solar-powered backpack made from recycled soda bottles and it can charge anything from your cell phone to you ipod.

At lunchtime they've given a new meaning to brown bagging it. Bring bamboo utensils to work instead of plastic and get a load of these wrap mats.

Everybody, we go trough these like crazy, so this handy little item it's called a wrap-and-mat. You can stash your food inside of it.

And reusable water bottles are a no-brainer.

You spend 8 to 9, 10 dollars on a reusable water bottle versus 1 to 2 dollars for a bottle of water everyday. It'll pay for itself very, very quickly.

So there you have it. Reusable bags are not only eco-friendly, but eco-nomical.

Again the website is reusable-bags-dot-com . Most of the bags are between ten and 20 bucks. The site even got a mention in Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth" so check it out. One percent of the sales go back to an organization that's saving the planet a penny at a time.