Jute Bags – The Perfect Environmentally Friendly Alternative

Looking for a way to reduce your carbon footprint and help the environment? Look no further than jute bags! Jute is an environmentally friendly material that can be used to make a variety of products, including bags.

Jute bags are sturdy and long-lasting, making them a great alternative to traditional plastic or paper bags.

Natural, Eco-Friendly Reusable Jute Bag

Jute is a highly versatile fabric that grows quickly and requires little or no pesticides or chemicals. Unlike plastic bags, jute bags made from jute fibres are 100% biodegradable and recyclable making them a great eco-friendly option. It’s also a very durable fabric and strong enough to handle heavy loads.

What is Jute?

Jute is a long and strong vegetable fibre that comes from a couple of different plants, Corchorus capsularis and Corchorus olitorius, with Corchorus capsularis giving the better quality fibres.

Jute has been used for centuries and is becoming more and more popular due to its ready availability and environmental credentials.

The fibres used for making fabric come from the stem of the plant and are manually separated. Jute is one of the most affordable and environmentally friendly natural fabrics. It is the most commonly used vegetable fibre after cotton but unlike cotton, it is grown with very little need for fertilizers or pesticides.

Once the jute fibres are extracted they have many uses and can be woven into rope, fabric for clothing and bags, rugs and jute can be easily blended with other fibres. One of the most common uses for jute is hessian sacks used to package coffee and other commodities.

Why is Jute a good material for bags?

Jute makes a good material for bags as it is:

• Easy to grow with little chemical intervention required.
• Very eco-friendly and 100% biodegradable.
• Strong and durable with a high tensile strength.
• Sturdy enough to produce free standing bags with a rectangular base perfect for shopping.
• Widely farmed and so one of the most affordable natural fibres available.
• Easy to colour.

How Jute bags can be used.

A jute bag is used for everything from packaging bulk commodities to doing your weekly shopping. Our range of jute bags come in a huge variety of patterns and sizes so they can be used for everything from packaging gifts or taking your lunch to work to help you carry the weekly shop.

Larger jute shopping bags make a great alternative to plastic bags for life. They are strong, easy to pack and carry and last really well. They also look much nicer and are fully recyclable or compostable at the end of their life.

The smaller just bags make an excellent reusable gift bag or can be given as part of the gift. They are also the perfect size to take your lunch to work with you or carry your purse and water bottle if you don’t want to take a large handbag.

The medium-sized bags are perfect for a trip to the shops, larger gifts, and all sorts of other uses including keeping a change of clothes in the car, taking a blanket and towel to the beach or even to use as a handbag alternative.

Why choose a Jute Bag?

Although obviously any reusable option like jute bags is far better for the environment than using a single-use plastic bag, jute is a pretty incredible fibre with great eco-credentials.

• Growing jute uses a lot less pesticides and chemicals than cotton used to make cotton canvas bags.

• Jute grows quickly and can be harvested every 4-6 months.

• It also enriches the soil and absorbs far more CO2 from the atmosphere than cotton.

• Jute produces more fibre per hectare than cotton leaving more space for growing food.

What makes jute bags an eco-friendly choice?

Jute bags are a popular choice for reusable jute shopping bags, gift bags and promotional bags as well as having been used for centuries for packing everything from cotton and wool to coffee and cocoa.

Jute, also known as hessian or burlap is a plant fibre that is relatively quick to grow and east to process and it the second most common natural fibre to cotton. Often referred to as the golden fibre due to its colour and financial worth jute is primarily grown in Bangladesh and India where it is a valuable cash crop.

With current trends moving towards more reusable eco-friendly options that are less damaging to the planet you might be interested to know why jute is considered an environmentally friendly option.

Jute is an eco-friendly and sustainable material

Jute has some remarkable properties which contribute to its eco-friendly credentials.

• Jute grows very quickly without the need for pesticides or fertilizers. In fact, it can be harvested every 4-6 months.
• Not only does jute not require fertilizers to grow it actually enriches the soil making it ideal for crop rotation.
• Jute requires a lot of water to grow but is generally grown in areas where rainfall is high and so doesn’t require irrigation.
• Jute is generally harvested and processed by hand providing employment and further reducing the environmental impact when compared to other crops.
• Not only does jute require very little
• Jute is a very strong fibre and very durable meaning it can be used many many times making it a better option than paper or plastic.
• Despite being strong and durable jute is biodegradable and will break down in 1-2 years.
• Although currently, underutilized jute has a woody core that could be used to help reduce the need for deforestation.

Jute Bags Vs Plastic Bags

If bags have been made from Jute for far longer than they have been made from plastic, and plastic is known to be unsustainable due to the fact it is made from oil which is a non-renewable resource, why are plastic bags so popular?

The simple answer is cost. As plastics were developed they became a cheap packaging material. Or at least they are lower cost in terms of the price you pay upfront, but not necessarily lower cost when you consider the wider impacts and long term environmental effects.

Plastic has many great properties as well as some pretty major disadvantages. Two that are particularly relevant in this instance are the fact that it doesn’t biodegrade and the fact that it is made from non-renewable resources.

Jute on the other hand, despite being strong and durable, will biodegrade completely in 1-2 years and is a rapidly growing crop that requires very little intervention to produce high yields.