Don't Throw Away The Tags From Bread Bags — Here's A Hack To Reuse Them

The age of the climate crisis has led the food industry to look introspectively at how it can contribute toward sustainable consumption. One way it has done so is by championing zero-waste grocery shopping. Aimed at limiting discarded excess in the culinary professions, the zero-waste movement doesn't have to be restricted to food. Learning about how to repurpose other items related to your own kitchen — especially plastic and other non-biodegradable products — is key. And the best way to start is by thinking small.

The square-shaped, firm plastic tags used to seal the open end of bread bags may seem useless for anything other than their originally defined purpose; To keep bread packaging as airtight as possible. But they're perfect for a number of other uses. The colorful tags make the perfect markers for wine glasses. At dinner parties and other events with many guests, people often lose track of whose glass is whose. But you can snap the tag's little plastic arms around the stem of the glass to allow your guests to effortlessly identify their own. (Bonus points for fitting names or initials on the tag.) Plastic bread tags come in different colors, which makes it even easier to ensure no one else is sipping from your glass.

Beyond marking stemware, you can use those small, multicolored bread bag tags in other ways — both culinary-related and not. And, as it turns out, you might end up with more clever ideas than your current supply of sturdy little clips.

It might seem like a no-brainer, but you can use these tags to secure other bags, too. For instance, if you need to loosely cover a dish or recipe-in-progress, repurpose the bread tags as a way to seal cling wrap around a bowl or another container. If you have bags without an automatic seal, such as cereal bags, you can collect the tags in a corner of your pantry shelf or utensil drawer, giving you and your housemates quick and easy access to an instant bag sealer.

These firm-edged bread tags can also be used to clean out small, tough-to-scrub spots in your kitchen. Like you would use a dish scraper, you can use the small tags from bread bags to scrape off food residue and clean the grooves in a dirty gas stove or cut through the grime on an espresso maker. Small, but mighty, it's a bread bag tag's world and we're all just living (sustainably) in it.