Crocheted Products Recycle Plastic Bags

10Nov/090

Crocheted Products Recycle Plastic Bags

: Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As we all know, plastic bags in general, and plastic grocery bags in particular are the bane of modern life. The plastic bag has become so common that its hard to imagine life without it. Other parts of the world have even more problems with them than we do, because they don't have sophisticated land-fills as we do in North America, so the bags are simply discarded to blow where the wind takes them. There was even a movement in India to change the national flower from the lotus to the plastic grocery bag.
Plastic bags are a real source of conflict for anyone who is environmentally conscious. True, they wreak havoc and are made from oil. On the other hand, a return to paper bags would cause too much pressure on dwindling timber resources, and paper bags are not exactly eco-friendly either. So, what is a person who thinks green to do?
A lady named Lucille Charters has come up with a lovely way to recycle some of the grocery bags into useful products. One of the answers to the grocery bag problem is to carry your own cloth bags to the store. Instead of doing that, why not make the reusable shopping bags out of plastic grocery bags? She found a way to do that through the art of crochet.
The basic process, and stroke of genius in my opinion, is to convert plastic bags into plarn (plastic yarn). This is done by slicing across the plastic bag to produce a bunch of plastic rings, then hooking the rings together the same way you would a bunch of rubber bands to make a long chain. I imagine the plarn is rolled somehow, so that the products is somewhat round. This plarn can be used to crochet, and possibly to knit, all kinds of different items. Best of all, these projects use up lots of plastic bags. One crocheted grocery bag requires 125 plastic grocery bags. The resulting products are nearly indestructible and incredibly strong.
There is a website devoted to the various uses for plastic bags, where you can get patterns, tips and new recycling ideas. Check it out. We may come to regard plastic bags as precious resources rather than garbage.
Full disclosure: I heard about this way of recycling bags in Mike McCardell's wonderful book The Expanded Reilly Method.