customgreenpromos.com Blog

by Sandra Sims

When shoppers bring in their own reusable grocery bags to carry their items home in, it reduces the number of non-biodegradable plastic bags. Personally I have been wanting to get some reusable bags for some time now. I am tired of the plastic and paper bags cluttering up my garage and polluting our community (and our world in general). So when my local grocery store started offering these bright green reusable shopping bags for just 99 cents each I was delighted.

These bags are very durable, flat bottomed and can hold as much as much as 3 times what a plastic sack would. Now these bags in particular were not being sold as a fundraiser, just as a promotion for the store. In fact the grocery store offers 5 cents off when you bring them in. Not much, but it’s a nice touch.

Til now I have held off reviewing or promoting reusable bags as a fundraiser, even though there are several companies out there providing them. I believe I’ve finally found a great recommendation for you, and here’s why:

First I like to see a company who is selling a product not just make a buck but because of a driving principle. Custom Green Promos Inc. out of Cleveland,Oh impresses me as being very committed to reducing pollution. Their website http://www.customgreenpromos.com/ is professional and educational with statistics about plastic bag use and what impact green bags could have. According to them, an average person will take their shopping home in 250 plastic bags per year!

Fundraising with Reusable Grocery Bags

First to use these as a fundraiser the bags need to have attractive pricing, both the wholesale cost for the non-profit agency and a good price for the consumer. I’ve seen bags from other companies that have suggested retail of $10-20 which even for a fundraiser is a bit pricey. This high pricing will be a turn-off for some people.

A product sales fundraiser has to be something that people really want and need. The general public is becoming more and more interested in actions that will help preserve our earth. Using these bags instead of plastic or paper bags that will end up in a landfill is one of the easiest ways to do something. Retailers also have an incentive to promote these bags. If customers bring their own bags the stores save thousands of dollars per year in costs.

I talked with a customer service representative at Custom Green Promos Inc., and they said that they have sold the bags to several charities as a fundraiser. They will sell them in bulk to your group at a very affordable cost. This might not sound like a lot raised per bag but this way more people can purchase them and can get several of them. Most families will need at least 2-6 bags if they plan on using them at the grocery store.

This would be a great way for a retailer and large organization, such as a school, to partner for mutual benefit. For example, by using school colors and logo it’s a spirit item. If the store and/or other retailers put their logo on them its a publicity item. It could be a co-branded promotion where both the store and the charity logos are on the bags. The minimum order for custom imprints is 100 but they also have stock bags for those needing lower quantities without a logo.

As I mentioned each bag will only bring in a dollar or two, so you will need to set a goal for the number of bags you want to sell in order to meet a fundraising goal. Keep in mind that in addition to the funds raised you are raising awareness about your cause and providing a way for people to do something good for the environment.

The biggest drawback I can see with this project is the potential competition. Just today I was running errands and saw reusable bags on sale at two other stores in addition to the grocery where I bought mine. They were also selling for $1-2. The difference I can see though is that those stores are not actively promoting them like the grocery store was. Of course they were also not benefiting any charity.

If your organization got behind this as a big campaign then you could be quite successful with it. Just be sure to be the first and/or biggest group in your area doing this program. If several organizations and stores can partner together it would boost your chance of success.

Mar 3, 2010 Marilyn Michaud

New eco-friendly, reusable bags eliminate the need for plastic by offering a greener, low carbon, and free-trade alternative. Here are 4 great green options.

Have you been to the grocery store lately and just felt guilty using those throwaway plastic bags. Talk about a waste. They are discarded so frequently into the environment causing pollution and litter everywhere. It’s time to do something about this and take a stand. The next time you go to the grocery store, make sure you make good use of reusable grocery bags. Either bring them with you to the store and purchase a couple while you are there. It will make a big difference to the world we live in. I know that I felt great the last time i went to the grocery store and brought along a couple of my own reusable bags. It made me feel like I was making a difference and that I was doing my part in saving the planet. Let’s all make sure we take part in this movement of going green and use reusable shopping bags.

“Reusable Bags, now there’s an idea that won’t catch on”, might have been the thinking a few years ago or so. Yet now the world is in economic and environmental meltdown, most major stores are now offering reusable shopping bags to their customers. As the environmental issues have gained momentum and the problem of huge waste resulting from millions ( UK consumers in the year 2000 used more than 17 million plastic carrier bags ) of plastic bags that are not biodegradable and harmful to the planet, being given away with almost every purchase and then simply discarded, the need for change was inevitable. What are the benefits of having a reusable bag? Well there are many but for example if the bag is a printed cotton bag, then they can be sturdier than your common plastic bag, with less worry about it breaking when carrying something heavier. Then there are the huge commercial benefits with company branding designs placed conveniently on the bag wherever the retailer desires and you have yourself some of the most affordable advertising available. Billboard and sign advertising is very costly and often businesses can’t afford to pay for that level of exposure. If then businesses either give their new reusable grocery bags away with purchases or charge a small fee for them, the benefits are obvious. Lots of happy shoppers walking up and down the town centre with your logo emblazoned all over their bags, reaching places billboards can never reach. This evidence alone should convince environmentally minded retailers and consumers that the transfer to reusable bags is both a healthy one and a potentially profitable one, as apparently the production and cost of these reusable bags is very economical. In July 2005 the Scottish Parliament introduced a bill calling for the levy on plastic bags. The environmental committee of the Scottish Parliament said, “In practice, the Bill would require all retailers to charge customers 10p for every plastic bag they were supplied with. The Bill aims to protect the environment by reducing the number of plastic bags in circulation, raise awareness of environmental issues and encourage consumers to use alternatives.” In the long term reusable bags will cost less per bag than the proposals planned for in store plastic bags. Common sense tells us that this can surely be the only way forward with regards to this issue and there are numerous websites that specialise in printing and producing these reusable bags, many of them offering a huge selection of styles, colours and designs.

You may have noticed that beginning around April 2007 there was a wave of activity with reusable shopping bags. Mostly this was directed towards encouraging people to start using reusable grocery bags. That is where the average person consumes the most paper or plastic shopping bags. Why all of the sudden media buzz? Is it marketing hype, reactionary environmentalism or a meaningful campaign? And, assuming you find the premise for using them to be sound, we will provide a brief reusable bags shopping guide to help you make a wise purchase.

Is It All Just Hype?

The statistics related to the consumption of plastic and paper shopping bags are nothing short of terribly alarming. Here are just a few: Americans consume 100 billion plastic shopping bags every year. Over 500 billion are consumed worldwide and about 4 billion become general litter. It’s imperitive that we make a move to reusable shopping bags. Each ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 7,000 gallons of water.

Based upon our own calculations (all types of shopping without using reusable bags) it is likely that you use more than 2,000 paper and plastic shopping bags a year for each member of your family. Consider the volume of space that this might require if you had to put all of the disposable shopping bags you acquired into a closet. For a family of four, it wouldn’t take long to need a bigger storage room. The fact is that none of this material is required to make life better or more enjoyable. Quite the opposite, it all goes to a recycling station or simply to a landfill where ultimately someone, our children or theirs at the latest, will find the consequences very disturbing.

It has become a common misconception that simply “recycling” our garbage is a sufficient response to the negative environmental impact we are having on our planet. It is much more important to eliminate things that we don’t need first! Avoiding needless waste is far better than recycling though recycling is obviously much better than indiscriminate dumping. The buzz about reusable shopping bags is definitely a worthwhile campaign to reduce needless waste. It is a simple change of habit where everyone can have a meaningful impact … one small needless shopping bag at a time.  The reusable shopping bags buzz is definitely a significant and reasonable undertaking. The production and disposal of plastic and paper bags touches upon all facets of what we are doing wrong. The raw materials, be they pulpwood or petroleum, are better reserved for other uses. The production of disposable bags creates unnecessary pollution and wastes additional energy resources. And what we have at the end of these short life cycle commodities is a great big pile of waste that needs to be dealt with.

Reusable shopping bags cannot eliminate all of the waste and energy consumption but they are vastly more efficient.

The sudden flurry of promotion for reusable bags is very simple. On one hand, there are realities being dealt with as land fills are simply filling up too fast. Many municipalities in the USA and abroad are grappling with possible legislation to ban plastic shopping bags. On the other hand, corporate public relations and marketing folks have obviously decided to get on the “right” side of this issue before being compelled or penalized.

Reusable bags are saving the world and making sure the earth is a clean and safe place for generations to c0me. It’s essential to make sure that we make these products a part of our everyday lives. They have so many benefits that there is no argument against using them. They have an important role in the personal lives of people when they go shopping. Aside from people using them at home, companies across the globe are using them to advertise. All of their uses are endless so let’s make sure we are using green bags in order to save the planet.