With each bag of the "Species at Risk" collection that is sold, Shopantuk Co. makes a donation to the Canadian Wildlife Federation to help support conservation of endangered Canadian animals.

Every year each Canadian produces one ton of garbage, most of which ends up in municipal dumps.  Astounding, isn't it?

Even when taking into account its packaging, one Shopantuk bag can save 500 to 1000 times its weight in paper bags if it's used just once a week!  You will no longer need to waste plastic and paper shopping bags, thus greatly reducing waste that goes to landfill.

 SAVES NATURAL RESOURCES

When you pick up an item to buy, whether it is fruit, an appliance or a plastic or paper bag, the substances the item is made of represent only the tip of the iceberg with regards to the total matter that went into its manufacture.

PAPER BAGS

Unlike money, paper actually does grow in trees!  But even before cutting down the first tree, the paper company needs to carve a gridwork of roads across the forest, using bulldozers which use energy.  Once the tree has been chopped down, the branches and bark are stripped off.  If they are left on the ground, they will decay and return to nature, but often they are burned, resulting in air pollution.  When the ground is stripped of its vegetation soil erosion takes place, which results in a large amount of soil washing away into streams and rivers.  This soil fills up the nooks and crannies of the riverbed where fish spawn.  Also, the fact that the trees are no longer there to shade the streams, results in unnatural warming of the water, which also hinders spawning.  The wood is then transported hundreds of kilometers to the mill, on trucks that use energy.  Then it is chopped up and digested with chemicals to produce a pulp. Other products are added to bind the fibers together before it is flattened and dried -- all these processes use energy.  Furthermore, the process results in large amounts of chemical and biological waste going into our waterways.  All this happens because people want a free paper bag instead of utilizing re-usable bags like Shopantuks!

 
PLASTIC BAGS

We all know that plastic is derived from oil.  But let's think this through from the beginning.  Using oil is unavoidable -- to maintain our modern way of living, we need the stuff.  We at Shopantuk are not suggesting that we must stop using oil.  What we are proposing is that we stop wasting it.  There are some very compelling reasons not to waste it.  Whenever we reduce our consumption of oil and oil products such as plastic bags, there will be:

• Fewer wars over oil 
• Fewer oil well blowouts and burnoffs 
• Fewer broken oil pipelines 
• Fewer animals' habitats interfered with by pipelines 
• Fewer ocean oil spills, thus less wildlife destroyed this way 
• Less energy wasted in oil exploration, extraction, transport and refining 
• Less smog due to the refining processes 
• Less water and soil pollution caused by refineries 
• Less global warming 
• Less waste going to landfill 
• More of this irreplaceable resource left for future generations 

Click for a different perspective on these two resources.