Eco-Friendly Bags

Product Spotlight: Eco-Friendly Bags

While Onya now has a range of eco-friendly bags and other products to offer the world, we started out with the humble shopping bag. Many of us know that single-use plastic bags are bad for the environment, but in the midst of our otherwise busy lives, it’s sometimes hard to remember to bring your reusable bag each time you pick up milk and eggs.

Rather than feeling guilty for only occasionally bringing along our shopping bags, the solution presented itself in the form of a simple carabiner. No longer the need to make a special effort to remember your eco-friendly bags if it is always on your keyring.

Inspired by the lightweight, yet sturdy construction of a backyard hammock, the Onya original shopping bag does its own circus trick by stuffing away into a tiny sack which dangles next to your keys – something else you’ll hopefully never leave behind.

What’s old is new

Not content with just making a product which looked good, we wanted to be doing good by the environment in another way. The fabric we use to make our bags is a nifty little invention called rPET.

And no, it’s not a typo, it’s a fabric made from recycled plastic bottles. But what do these letters mean?

The plastic bottles which we could all do without, the ones we toss in the bin once we’ve drained the last drop without a second thought are made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.

If these bottles aren’t recycled, which is unfortunately still the case for many plastic bottles, they end up in landfill. However, when you do recycle your bottles, that lump of PET has the chance to become something new: rPET.

Once plastic bottles have been collected from recycling plants and cleaned, they undergo a transformation process by which they are crushed and melted into yarn, the material we use to create our handy bags.

Onwards and upwards

When you buy Onya eco-friendly bags, know that you’re holding something made from 51 per cent recycled plastic bottles – which was all made possible because someone thought to pop two water bottles in the recycle bin. Neat.

As you may have seen, we’ve got a few extra products on offer since we first started out selling our shopping bags in the Fremantle markets. We’ve got backpacks, two sizes of carry bags, a side bag and even customisable bags for your business.

One of the big things about our eco-friendly bags is that for every reusable bag, we stand to eliminate 1,000 plastic bags. So far, we’ve made a staggering 850,000 eco-friendly bags and counting. So if you think about, that’s 850 million fewer plastic bags to worry about.

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