Life Hack: Save Space, Fold Bags!

To say that my apartment has a lot of plastic bags would be the understatement of the century. The picture above is only about 1/3 of the bags that are jam-packed into a small cupboard in my kitchen. My roommates and I tend to go grocery shopping, crumple the bags up, shove them in the cupboard, and pray that to door closes. We use some of them as liners for trash cans and one every few months I donate a bunch to the local food pantry, but for the most part they just take up storage space in our kitchen.

NOT ANY MORE! I recently discovered what can only be called “Plastic Bag Origami” on Pinterest. It seemed like an easy way for our bags to take up less space, but you can never trust something you see on Pinterest until you do it yourself. So I set out to see if I could turn our cupboard from something you might see on an episode of “Hoarders” into a functional cabinet. Here’s step-by-step instructions on how to fold your plastic bags:

1. Smooth out bag so it lays flat. FYI – this step can be time consuming if, like me, you previously crumpled a ton of plastic bags into a small space.

2. Fold the bag in half.

3. Then fold it in half a second time so you have one long rectangle.

4. From the bottom end of the bag (aka the end that’s not the handles) fold the bag into triangles.

5. Keep folding bag in triangles until just the end of the handles are sticking out.

6. Tuck handles into flap of triangle so you have one, neat football that you can use your fingers to kick at your roommate. Just kidding! Now your plastic bags are easy to store or carry and they take up WAY less space than before.

This is all 94 plastic bags I started with all neatly folded. It doesn’t even look like 94 bags. It’s crazy how much space this saves!

The before and after shot is so visually pleasing. I couldn’t even get all the bags in the first photo without standing on my chair. Now look at them.

It was brought to my attention while I was sitting at my desk folding all 94 of these, that you can roll your plastic bags so they look like this.

This might work well, too. I even saw people on Pinterest putting rolls of bags in old Colorox wipe dispensers so they were easy to carry and , which is a neat idea. I personally had a much harder time keeping the roll neat while I was rolling it. Plus it kept coming unrolled while it sat on my desk. Also you cannot play finger football with a roll of bags.

You might be asking yourself, is it really worth the time and effort it probably took to fold all of these just to save a little space? And the answer is . . . no, it’s not if you fold 94 of them all at the same time like I did. But the folding honestly only took 15 or so seconds per bag. So if you did a week’s worth of grocery bags (say 4 or 5), it wouldn’t take long at all and therefore might be worth it. Plus I really like folding things so yea. Give it a try!