Free bags are a draw. Whether it is teachers or high school students, or gamers or computer engineers, if you are at a trade show table and want to make sure that you get the traffic that you want consider handing out a reusable grocery bag or insulated bag. If you are marketing to an adult crowd, wine bags are a great giveaway item. Although these bags of all kinds were designed for more specific uses, the benefits of reusable bags encourage people to stop by trade show booths that they otherwise might walk by.
The fact that we are a society that is trying to move away from the use of plastic bags that endanger the environment, everything from wine bags to simple cloth grocery bags continue to grow in popularity. And while these bags are a great marketing tool to many customers, they also serve as a blank canvas for retailers of all kinds offer look to promote specific products and events. Consider some of these clever uses of canvas bags, wine bags, and other useable products and the reasons that more and more Americans are moving away from the environmentally unfriendly practice of using plastic bags:
- Plastic bags make up more than 10% of washed-up debris polluting the U.S. coastline.
- Plastic bags are typically only used for 25 minutes.
- An estimated 1 million birds, 100,000 turtles, and numerous other sea animals die every year as a result of ingesting plastic. All of these animals confuse plastic particles and floating bags for edible sea life like plankton and jellyfish.
- 100 billion plastic bags a year are used in the U.S., meaning that the average person uses between 350 and 500.
- Even one person using reusable bags over a lifetime can remove more than 22,000 plastic bags from the environment.
- Plastic bags can take up to 1,000 years to degrade in landfills because they do not biodegrade, but instead photo-degrade, which means that they break down into smaller toxic pieces, many of which end up in oceans causing dangerous bioaccumulation in the food chain
- The average reusable bag has a lifespan that is equal to more than 700 disposable plastic bags.