Welcome to the Borrow Bags (formerly Boomerang Bags) page of our site! We’d love to see more towns and villages get involved with this scheme. If you would like some custom Borrow Bag labels for your bags, we can usually provide some. Please get in touch by mailing hello@finalstrawfoundation.org. Likewise, if you are a shop or business that would like to be part of the scheme and use the bags that have been made by our volunteers, please let us know!

How does it work?

For sewing volunteers

Borrow bags are made up by local sewing volunteers and given to shops that have signed up for the scheme so shoppers can borrow and bring them back when they remember. They are made from reclaimed material – from old curtains to offcuts of sail fabric, saving it from landfill and repurposing it to become something useful.

As a volunteer sewer, you can give the finished bags to participating shops or perhaps to family, friends or maybe even complete strangers! Basically, we’d like to see Borrow Bags anywhere that still uses single-use plastic bags. If in doubt, please just drop us a line through our contact page. We know that not all the bags will come back to the shops, but hope that a few will, and we can reduce the plastic even further in the area and across the country. Together, we can work together to encourage a less wasteful society with small schemes like this, encouraging people to think twice about single-use plastic bags and plastic in general.

We also need donations of materials. It really doesn’t matter what it looks like or how old it is, but it needs to be clean and have no holes!

You can also follow a useful video made by Boomerang Bags here that shows how to make this kind of fabric bag.

For shops

If you are a shop that would like to stock Borrow Bags, please get in touch with us through our contact page, and we will be happy to help. You need to either place the bags somewhere obvious for people to help themselves or offer them to customers at the till as an alternative to a plastic bag. Please make sure that any that are returned to you are not really dirty (although they are machine washable!). You can download the accompanying poster here. Please display this in your shop – this could be in the window or near where the bags will be available to customers.