How FreshDirect customers took Reusable bags and make it fashion

Credit: By Adriane Quinlan, The New York Times 

When the grocery delivery company stopped taking back its bags during the pandemic, some people used their stashes to make purses, journals and works of art.

FreshDirect Reuseable bag. Source: FreshDirect

This article is part of a series examining Responsible Fashion, and innovative efforts to address issues facing the fashion industry.

Shelley Parker, a handbag designer, frequently used leather before the pandemic started. However, as life became isolated during the lockdowns, Ms. Parker, 54, found it intolerable to consider ordering anything online. She remarked, "When I buy leather, I touch and feel it. I detect it. In 2020, when her supply of leather ran out, Ms. Parker began experimenting with a medium that by that time was more prevalent in her Queens apartment: the vibrant plastic bags that FreshDirect used to send groceries in, which the company's emblem is surrounded by produce. “The colors, the patterns, the small text — I like all of that,” said Ms. Parker, an adjunct professor in the accessories design department at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the designer of the accessories line Riveting. “It just speaks to me.”

Ms. Parker started by cutting up the FreshDirect reusable bags. She created a few handbags and small pouches out of those leftovers using methods like plaiting, macramé, and the Japanese stitching style sashiko. “I’m a FreshDirect artist,” said Ms. Parker, who is selling some of the purses for $899 on her website. “I didn’t mean to be, but the bags called to me.”

An $899 handbag designed by Shelly Parker using FreshDirect bags.Credit: Shelley Parker

During the epidemic, as more people opted for grocery delivery, other people began to use FreshDirect reusable bags as a source of inspiration for design projects.

Colleen Paeff, 54, a children’s book author, used some of the bags to extend a short curtain in her Brooklyn home. “I realized that if I had more, I could have made the entire curtain out of FreshDirect bags,” she said.

Bailey Constas, 29, ripped the bags into pieces that she painted and used as the covers for handmade journals that she plans to sell at regional craft shows after using them as packing material during her move from Brooklyn to Denver. “I’m just letting the material speak to me,” Ms. Constas, an artist and digital consultant, said of the FreshDirect bags.

Bailey Constas created journals with covers made from pieces of FreshDirect bags that she had painted.Credit: Bailey Constas

FreshDirect was established in Queens in 2002, and since then its delivery coverage has expanded to around 21 counties in the tristate region. According to John MacDonald, the company's chief marketing officer, around 150,000 bags are being used to transport groceries every week. The bags may be returned to FreshDirect for many years, and they would recycle part of them. However, the business discontinued this arrangement in 2020, leaving many customers with an excess of bags. It wasn’t long after FreshDirect stopped taking its bags back that Alex Dabagh, whose company Anybag in New York uses plastic bags to make tote bags, heard from people looking to offload their stashes. “They’re reusable but, you know, it’s like, there’s just so much out there,” he said.

“I started getting phone calls and emails from people saying, ‘Hey, we have all these FreshDirect bags piling up in our house, in my apartment, in my kitchen. I don’t have any more space for them,’” Mr. Dabagh, 40, added.

He began to collect FreshDirect bags and turned four of them into a $133 Anybag tote. Since then Mr. Dabagh has acquired between 300 to 400 more FreshDirect bags, which he plans to use as material for a future collection of totes.

The marketing department of FreshDirect chooses and takes pictures of the vegetables that will be on the bags. To reflect the varieties of fruits and vegetables that may be within the bags when they arrive at customers' doors, new patterns are periodically produced. (Warning: The theme of summer 2023 is corn.) According to Mr. MacDonald of FreshDirect, "the bags kind of represent some of the spirit of the company."

The bags are "not easily reusable," according to Vincent Gragnani, a spokesman for the New York Department of Sanitation, despite the fact that they are made from recycled plastic. According to Mr. MacDonald, one factor in FreshDirect's decision to discontinue accepting returned bags was the ineffective and wasteful nature of the recycling process.. “We don’t want to bring the bags back in, and then reuse them, because that’s not something that we want to do,” he added, noting that the company is instead “exploring a whole bunch of different things” it could do with the bags people don’t want.

FreshDirect worked with charities last year that will collect the bags left behind by its customers as donations. These groups include The Red Door Place, a food pantry and soup kitchen in Manhattan that uses the bags to distribute foodstuffs, and the Brooklyn Book Bodega, which uses the bags to deliver books to kids, teens, and schools.

“Trying to purchase bags online would have taken a big chunk of our already tightly strained budget,” said Teresa Concepción, executive director of The Red Door Place. “Honestly the bags have made the difference,” she said.

Theda Sandiford, 52, an artist and senior vice president of commerce and digital at Def Jam Records, cannot look at the bags without being reminded of the pandemic during which they proliferated, as well as the grief and stress that it has caused. While some people, like Ms. Concepción, see benefits in the abundance of FreshDirect bags, others, like Ms. Sandiford, cannot look at the bags without being reminded of the pandemic. To help process those feelings, Ms. Sandiford sliced up FreshDirect bags that she had collected from the trash room of her apartment building in Jersey City, N.J., and wove the pieces through shopping carts to create artworks for a series she called Emotional Baggage Carts.

Bailey Constas created journals with covers made from pieces of Fresh Direct Bags that she had painted. Credit: Bailey Constas

"I'm an emotional empath and I needed to put it somewhere so I wasn't carrying it," Ms. Sandiford said. The first cart she made using FreshDirect bags, called "Wide Load," now belongs to the Museum of COntemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn. She showed other carts, ealier this month, at the Satellite Art Show in Miami Beach, Fla. On her website, one cart she made using FreshDirect bags is for sale for $15,000.

TLPPACKAGING FOR SHOPPING BAGS