Lee Jean’s “Never Wasted” shopping bag isn’t the perfect sustainable solution for shopping bags, but it is a big step towards that ideal.
Designed by Happy Creative, a marketing and design agency in Bangalore, India, the paper bag is designed to be cut apart and reused instead of being tossed into the recycling bin.
“With the relevance of eco-friendly initiatives increasing every day, Lee wanted an innovative solution that would display their affiliation towards the same and also spread the message amongst their customers,” Happy Creative stated on its blog.
The resulting creation was the Never Wasted shopping bag. Happy Creative could have followed the pack and paid homage to Lee’s commitment to sustainability by designing a shopping bag that was reusable or made of recycled materials. Instead, they put on their creative thinking caps and created something completely unique: a bag that can be re-purposed into a variety of objects.
I think this concept has amazing potential for future iterations. Especially if the bag is printed in many different editions. The reasons it falls short of my ideal as a sustainable shopping bag option are 1) it is not clear if the bag is made from recycle materials, 2) the glue and tape required to put together most of the objects that can be created from this bag aren’t exactly environmentally-friendly, and 3) I question how many consumers are actually going to take the time to cut this bag up and assemble Lee-branded objects such as a Chutes and Ladders-style game, a little Black Book, and a CD holder. I mean, is the average Lee consumer into Chutes and Ladders and are they still purchasing CDs? And this little Black Book, shouldn’t it be called a Little Brown Book? And how well are these items going to hold up as they will be made from brown craft paper? I’m just saying …
