Wanted to put beads and small shells in.
"But you can't see through them to see what is inside. Since they are a total Green."
Conflicting info about product
"The bags are marked compostable only in big plants. Seller's description says home compostable. Need to know which is correct. I can only use home compostable"
Very thick plastic bags
"I bought these compostable plastic baggies to assuage the guilt I’ve been feeling over polluting the landfills with plastic Ziploc bags.
I like to use snack size resealable bags to portion out snacks for my children, so they can just grab them and help themselves without me having to drop everything I’m doing to get them a snack. The types of things I put in these bags are: Goldfish crackers, peanut butter filled pretzels, graham crackers, animal crackers, etc. I recently got a big Costco order and portioned out a bunch of snacks in one go, so I was able to give these bags a thorough test. I needed to finish up a box of Ziploc brand bags before opening these compostable bags, so I was able to compare them side-by-side.
First off, I will say that the Ziploc bags are more cleverly designed. The Ziplocs a little tab on one side that allows for the ease of opening. It’s not that big of a deal though, unless you are opening a whole bunch of bags in one go. The Ziploc bags also have a kind of clicking feel when you’re closing them, so you know you’ve closed the seal properly. The compostable bags don’t have this feature, so you might not know if you’ve missed sealing the bag. This also is probably not that big of a deal, unless you’re storing things longer term and miss the seal on a bag and the contents go stale. Or if you missEd the seal and were storing something that could leak a little, like cut up fruit or veggies.
Now, onto the plastics. The compostable plastic feels much thicker and sturdier than the Ziploc brand bags. However, the compostable plastic is not transparent. In fact, the plastic is almost opaque. This might not matter if you are using the bags to pack lunch, but if you’re storing something and hoping to identify it by sight, without having to label the bag, this could be a problem.
The Ziploc bags seemed to pull out of the box easier, but this appeared to be a feature of the thin plastic film- not so much a design feature. Something to consider though if you are using a lot of baggies at a time.
All in all, I’m willing to put up with a little inconvenience for the sake of leaving a cleaner planet for future generations. However, I do hope the manufacturers will tweak their design slightly to make them more user friendly.
UPDATE: I had been wondering why my kids weren't eating their Goldfish crackers I'd packaged up for them, so I opened a package and tried them- they were completely stale. Ok, I thought, maybe it's a fluke. So, I opened another package- stale. And another package- stale. And another package- stale. And so on. This absolutely does not happen when I use Ziploc brand baggies. So, the moral of the story is don't trust these for longer term storage of snacks. I'm planning to try out the BioBag brand compostable resealable baggies and see if they are any better, but I won't be using this brand anymore for portioning out my kids snacks."
