New Life for Plastic Bags

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With great interest in the usage of plastic bags, our friends over at Chicagoist have found a group of retired women using the bad bags to make good.

Despite the best intentions to carry a re-usable bag, we still end up with a heap of plastic bags shoved into our kitchen cabinet. And we haven't found many creative and sustainable ways to re-use these pesky bags.

Ruth Werstler did find a way to up-cycle plastic shopping bags. Ms. Werstler’s benevolent venture, New Life for Old Bags (NLOB), began as a way to entertain and engage residents of Bethesda nursing home, help the less fortunate, and protect the environment. NLOB collects plastic bags and creates plastic yarn, affectionately known as “plarn.” The plarn is crocheted into sleeping mats for the homeless in Chicago. Since its inception, NLOB has made over 240 mats—that amounts to 168,000 bags. Read more. [Chicagoist]