You want to eliminate plastic bags but there you are in the produce aisle of the grocery store thinking about alternatives. You don’t want to put a pile of apples, carrots, and parsnips loose on the in your basket and worse on a checker’s conveyor belt.  Someone with Covid 19 could have sneezed on it!  So you sigh and pull another bag off the roll and in goes your lettuce, carrots, parsnips, apples, and everything else.  Plus that plastic keeps everything nice and fresh.  Who wants limp veggies anyway?

The solution? Switch to reusable mesh produce bags.  These are inexpensive and a fabulous alternative to plastic.  I store them in my reusable shopping bags so they are handy at the store.  You can see through them and wash them when they get soiled.  They are also good for organizing items on trips.  

They one drawback is they don’t keep vegetables as fresh as plastic bags.  The “crisper” drawer 

in the bottom of my refrigerator keeps vegetables anything but crisp if I put it in without plastic. Fruit is fine. My solution to this is to take one of the white kitchen garbage bags from the stock I had before I went to plastic-free garbage cans.  I remove the tender produce from the mesh bags and load them into one of those liner bags. Then place the big bag with produce in the drawer.  Every few weeks I swap the crisper bag with a clean bag, spray the used bag with my vinegar cleaning solution and let it dry.  It will be ready to rotate with the other bag when it’s time.

I purchase my net produce bags at my local Fred Meyer / Kroger store 3 for 99 cents. If your grocery store does not provide Amazon, Target and other sellers have them online.

Plastic bag facts

According to the Earth Policy Insitute:

Worldwide, a trillion single-use plastic bags are used each year, nearly 2 million each minute.

The amount of energy required to make 12 plastic shopping bags could drive a car for a mile.