A while ago, my husband and I made the switch from plastic grocery bags to canvas ones. It was mostly my fault. Watching the plastic bags from our shopping trips pile up was a big indicator of just how much needless waste we were generating, and so I proposed we use canvas. As it turns out, I like these much better than the plastic. For one, they hold more – if you get the right canvas bags (the ones we bought from Harris Teeter hold twice what the plastic bags do, and they don’t break). Even cooler than that, they’re far more comfortable to carry. No more getting my fingers cut off by plastic bag handles because the bag is too heavy, or having the bottom drop out of a paper bag for the same reason. These even fit over my shoulders. And we do have to throw them in the wash every few months, but that’s easy enough.

So if you haven’t switched to canvas bags yet, do it. It takes some doing to get in the habit of remembering to take them back down to the car after a shopping trip, but it’s so worth it – for utterly selfish reasons of convenience, even if you don’t care about how much useless plastic bag garbage you’re generating.