The Best Eco-Friendly Plastic Snack Bag Alternative
I began my quest for an eco-friendly alternative to plastic snack baggies when I realized what an absurd amount I was using on a daily basis to contain my children's after-school snacks.
To keep my kids fed through long afternoons away from home, I was buying enormous packages of pretzels, dried cranberries, Goldfish and other goodies from Costco and then dividing the contents into a billion little snack baggies. If you do the math, 3–4 baggies per day per child adds up to 30–40 plastic baggies every single week. That's an astounding amount of waste.
When my town stopped recycling plastic bags of any sort, the last vestige of justification I was clinging to disappeared. It was time to find a better option.
How I Tested
I ordered a variety of plastic snack bag alternatives, went on a Costco run, and then got to work dividing up endless amounts of crackers, dried apricots, pretzel rods, and crunchy veggie sticks. I sent a few of each type of bag in my daughters' backpacks for a few days in a row and then quizzed them about what they liked and didn't like about each one. (If you were thinking that a second grader wouldn't have strong feelings about snack bags, think again.) I also put each of the cloth snack bags through the washer and dryer to see how they held up.
My Favorite: Small Muslin Double-Drawstring Bags
The best option I found is charmingly old-fashioned, but it’s both economical and easy to use: small muslin drawstring bags. The perfect size for holding a small snack’s worth of mini pretzels or bunny crackers, these machine-washable cotton bags can be filled en masse after a trip to the bulk store. And due, perhaps, to the proliferation of enterprising DIY crafters who use them to make lavender sachets and as packaging for homemade sea glass jewelry, they're easy to find online and in craft stores. I especially appreciated the thick double-drawstring on this sturdy version, which made it easy for me (and my 7-year-old) to pull the bag closed. The heavier cloth also offers a tighter seal to better contain all those bunny cracker crumbs—and it will stand up to repeated washings.
Other Brands I Tested
Square brown paper bags—like the sort used at a deli to hold sandwiches—seemed promising, but the sticker used to seal them wasn’t substantial enough to hold up to the beating the average kid gives their belongings in a day, plus the thin bags could only be used once. Reusable, zippered cloth bags were easy to fill and totally spill-proof, but the price was prohibitive considering the number of bags my kids would need to get through a week (and how infrequently we do laundry). A thinner, single-drawstring cotton bag was cheaper than the muslin variety, but the strings constantly came off, preventing my kids from re-sealing the open bags and spreading crumbs all over their backpacks.
It has been a couple of months since we switched over to the reusable muslin bags, and my daughters are slowly getting used to the change. They initially weren't happy about the fact that the opaque cloth makes it impossible to see at a glance which snacks each bag holds. But we all agree that a few extra moments of suspense is a small price to pay to stop sending all that plastic to the landfill.
