The Cool New Trend In Checkout Bags

NO PLASTIC, NO PROBLEM!

The stronger, more environmentally-friendly cousin of your usual paper bag.

We’ve mentioned a little bit about our new bamboo paper checkout bags before, but we haven’t given them all the hype they deserve just yet. So let’s get into the finer points of what makes this material so cutting edge and the perfect fit for your business.

Bamboo is an amazing material that is strong and durable while having some huge environmental benefits. It grows extremely fast, reaching maturity in just 3-5 years rather than 20+ years for hardwood trees to grow. This means that bamboo is highly renewable and much easier to harvest ethically without endangering the species as a whole and without using huge amounts of land. Using bamboo as the raw material for paper bags prevents deforestation of hardwood trees and allows them the chance to renew and regrow after the harm of clear-cutting and other deforestation techniques.

Although it grows very quickly, bamboo does a lot of good during its short lifespan through extremely high amounts of carbon sequestration. In fact, many final forms of bamboo actually end up being carbon neutral across their entire lifespan, with the carbon produced during manufacturing and transportation being entirely offset by the carbon sequestration that occurred during their growth. Not only that, but bamboo does not require nearly as much water or fertilizer to grow as hardwood trees do, as it is an extremely resilient plant.

This all sounds too good to be true, right? Surely if bamboo is so much better for the environment, it must be worse quality or something. Actually, quite the opposite. Bamboo fibres are finer and longer than that of wood, resulting in a more durable final product. This higher quality also means that your bamboo paper bag will last much longer than a regular paper bag and will have to be replaced fewer times, resulting in less waste. These superior fibres also allow for the same amount of paper to be produced using less raw materials and less manufacturing resources.

To put things into perspective, producing 1,000kg of wood pulp requires about 3,500-4,000kg of wood, equivalent to about 23 trees. Producing one ton of paper also requires about 300,000kg of water and 1,500kg of coal, along with large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions. In comparison, 1,000kg of bamboo pulp only requires about 2,000kg of bamboo, subsequently cutting all these other numbers in half. So what are you waiting for? Order your bamboo bags today and show off.