Friday, May 21, 2010

An experiment in reusable snack bags

I was at a local store this past week that sells "green" products and fell in love with these cute snack bags. The concept is so great, but the price is a bit high. I'd run across a similar product before (on Etsy, maybe?) and had read about people making them out of PUL and oilcloth, but it seems those fabrics are not necessarily food-safe, so I hadn't tried making them myself. But after I saw the product in my hand and got to thinking about how easy they would be to make, I did some brainstorming about possible food-safe lining materials and I may have come up with one. I used heavy-duty Ziploc freezer bags. I'm sure they have BPA, but I'm not going to put hot liquid in them, plus we already use (and wash and re-use) Ziploc bags, so I'm at least not changing our household status quo. The benefit of these over disposable snack bags is that the little bags are not usually made out of the same sturdy material as the freezer bags, and thus aren't reusable in the same way. Plus the little ones always seem to split in the corners, and they definitely aren't cute. I'm excited to give these a try. We'll probably be using them for mostly pretzels and crackers, nothing wetter than carrot sticks, so they shouldn't need much more than a wipe-out after we use them, but they seem sturdy enough that we could immerse and wash them in the sink with our dishes if necessary. If they work I'll make some more in some kid-approved prints.

2 comments:

  1. Did these work? How did you like them?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, they actually worked quite well. We're still using them, although I never did make more. :)

    ReplyDelete