SEATTLE - Many of us have changed our habits over the years to help the environment. We use travel mugs and cloth bags instead of disposable alternatives on a regular basis.
Now, two Seattle mothers think they have created a permanent alternative to all those plastic baggies that end up in the trash after just one morning in a lunch bag.
Karen Whorton says she was always bothered by the volume of plastic baggies her family went through every week.
"It is one of those last vestitudes of waste that we see," Whorton said. "I think I was counting on average 10 baggies a day that we were throwing away. And everything else - water bottles were reusable and lunch boxes were reusable, but the baggies, just throwing away every day."
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It bothered her enough that she began brainstorming. Eventually, she came up with a solution - a washable, re-usable cloth baggie. She turned to her friend Becky Harper, a talented seamstress, to her make them.
"As a parent, I loved it," said Harper. "I'm throwing away tons of Ziploc bags, or was. No longer."
The two moms experimented with patterns and ended up with ReUsies. They're lined with nylon to keep leaks to a minimum.
"So you can put apple slices, orange slices in there and it's not going to leak through," said Harper. "We like to joke that you can't put soup, that's Karen's favorite line, you can't put soup in the bag, but everything else you would pack in a child's lunch can go in there just fine."
The duo launched a Web site in April, and have already sold thousands of ReUsies from the business they run out of Becky's basement. They say they have learned there are two key elements to their sales: function and fashion statement.
"We learned very early on that an eight year old boy is not going to carry a cute little baggie to school," Whorton laughed. " It has to have skulls, it has to be camouflage and so we definitely have different target audiences!"
They also marvel at how quickly the concept seems to be catching on.
"I'm surprised someone hasn't done it before us," said Whorton.
ReUsies retail for $8.50 for a standard sandwich size, and $6.50 for a snack size bag. They are selling well not only in the Unites States, but in Canada and Australia, too. In fact, business is so brisk, the women just hired a manufacturer in Tukwila to help them keep up with demand.
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