The Green Guide Recommends. . .Sea Bags!

Welcome to the debut of our newest column! Having just completed our annual Top Product Picks issue, we realized that there are just too many great green products to devote only one issue to them, so now we'll be able to introduce these to you year-round.

Here at The Green Guide, we're always looking for ways to ease the environmental burden of the 14 billion plastic and 10 billion paper shopping bags handed out by grocery stores every year. Organic cotton canvas bags stand out as being the most eco-friendly alternative, but that material stains and isn't always water-resistant. Other reusable shopping bag manufacturers who want to improve a bag's durability and water-resistance resort to nasty fabrics like vinyl, which, among many other environmental ills, releases dioxins into the air during its production.

But then came Sea Bags, an innovative company situated along the shores of Maine that saw the durability and strength of old sailboat sails and recycled them into reusable shopping bags. The material used in the sails is Dacron, a trademark name for the polymer used in polyester production. While the material wasn't exactly kind to the earth while being produced (petroleum-based polyester contributes to the depletion of non-renewable fossil fuels and increases our dependence on foreign oil), you can enjoy the benefits of strength, water resistance and durability that come with Dacron without the guilt of further depleting the earth of its precious resources—and you save landfill space. Furthermore, Sea Bags handles are made of "ragrope," a material created from recycled rags that were spun into rope.

Sea Bags are a bit pricey, but with all their benefits, you can let the price slide, kind of like water off a ducks back. Small bags run $85 (14"w x 15"h); medium bags $95 (14"h x 15"h); and large bags $110 (20"w x 15"). (www.seabags.com; 207-780-0744).

If youre looking for a bigger bag with a little more portability, check out My Own Bag (www.myownbag.com). These colorful totes—made, unfortunately, from eco-unfriendly, non-recycled polyester and nylon—fold up into interior pockets, which make it easy to toss them into a purse or briefcase for those unplanned shopping trips on the way home from work. While the material isn't something we like to recommend, the trade-off you're making by keeping paper and plastic grocery bags out of landfills, where they take centuries to biodegrade, eases the guilt a bit. Slightly more cost-effective than Sea Bags at $58 a bag, My Own Bags are a bit bigger (17.5"w x 27"h) and resist water and stains better than cotton.

Image courtesy of Sea Bags.