Make this DIY bin bag dispenser for your car
Unless you’re a paragon of sustainable living practices, opening the cupboard under your kitchen sink is likely to cause an avalanche of old plastic supermarket shopping bags.Yes, it’s bad for the environment to use single-use, non-biodegradable plastic bags, but while we wean ourselves off them we can at least give them a second life as bin liners. If your kitchen collection overflows like ours does, transfer a bunch of bags to your car in a nifty DIY bag dispenser. Tidier cupboard, cleaner car. Here’s how to make one using an empty wet wipes container.
Here’s what you’ll need:
- an empty wipes container (doesn’t matter what kind of wipes – baby, kitchen or anti-bac – as long as your receptacle is cylindrical)
- a bunch of old plastic bags (10 to 12 should do it)
- coloured contact, because it’s more pleasing to behold a pretty pattern than qualified promises to “kill 99.9% of germs*” and “keep surfaces hygienically clean and fresh”, which (and let’s be honest) really just serve as reminders of how infrequently you clean your house
- scissors
Step 1
Cutesify your canister, because it’s not really a craft project unless the final product resembles something you’d find on Etsy. Instead of removing the label, you could just slap contact over the top. Yeah, some of the print will show through, but we’re trying to make your life easier, not give you more work. That said, go ahead and peel off the label and then soak away the glue if you’ve got more spare minutes than ingrown hairs to pick. Freeing the canister’s surface of its residual glue is almost as satisfying.
Step 2
Behold your pile of wrinkled shopping bags and contemplate how you’ve managed to accumulate so many. Smooth them all out flat, make sure the sides are neatly tucked in and fold each bag in half lengthwise.
Step 3
It’s time to create a folded-bag conga line! One by one, arrange your bags in a line with their handles and folds facing in the same direction, with handles and bottoms overlapping to form an orderly queue. Fold the handles of your first bag upwards.
Step 4
Much like the ‘toilet paper facing forwards or backwards on the roll’ conundrum, there are two competing approaches when it comes to rolling up your bags. Option one is to begin the roll at the bottom of your last bag, which positions your first bag outside the roll; option two is to begin rolling from the top of your first bag, which places its handles in the bag roll’s centre. Both have pros and cons. The first method poses the risk of the roll unravelling and not properly feeding through the canister’s lid. The second tends to trap air in the bags as you roll, no matter how well you’ve flattened them to begin with. Make sure not to roll too tightly this way, either – you don’t want your bags coming out all at once in a long tangled string. Experiment to work out which technique does it for you.
Step 5
Drop your bag sausage into the canister, pull your first bag through the opening and tuck it into the lid’s notch. Boom. Close the lid and chuck your new bin bag dispenser in your car. Now those messy back-seat passengers masquerading as friends and family have no more excuses for leaving rubbish lying around – and neither do you.
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