CNN
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When you’re trying to live a more sustainable life, it can be harder to find really useful eco-friendly file sharing sites than you think. That’s why we become obsessed when we discover really great and useful eco-friendly products like Swedish tea towels. Well, there’s good news because we’ve found another sustainable swap that we just can’t shut up about: stasher bags.
Stasher makes many claims about what these little wonder bags can do, so we have a handful of our own in different sizes to try out. We packed them up, washed them, microwaved them, frozen them, and boiled them to see if they really stacked up. Finally, we can definitely say that we will never buy another Ziploc bag again.
Kai Burkhardt / CNN
Stasher bags
Stasher bags are reusable bags made of platinum quality silicone, the highest quality silicone. The bags are free of BPA, BPS and other phthalates and meet FDA and EU requirements for food contact and safety. This means that not only can you use stasher bags to bring your lunch to work or keep leftovers in the refrigerator, you can also put them in the freezer, microwave, oven, and even boiling water without worry having to let plastic or chemicals get into your food.
The possibilities with stasher bags are really endless. You can freeze leftovers, pop popcorn in the microwave, reheat leftovers in the oven, and even make the perfect steak sous vide. They’re safer, more versatile, and simply better than a traditional plastic bag.
Stasher bags come in many different sizes and dozen of colors to meet all of your kitchen and storage needs. On Amazon, you can shop between sandwich, snack, half-gallon, and medium stand-up sizes, and there are additional options on Stasher’s website, including large and small stand-up sizes, a go with a carabiner -Bag and a tiny pocket bag. There is also a great list of bundles to start your stasher collection with.
Kai Burkhardt / CNN
Stasher bags
We’ve had several sandwich stasher bags for over a year and use them all the time, whether we’re packing lunch for a hike or keeping leftover chili in the freezer. They held up perfectly and we never noticed a strange taste when we store food in the bag.
We got our hands on a few more sizes recently, including the medium and large stand-ups, the half-gallon bag, and the snack bag, just to see if they’re as good as the original. We were honestly amazed at how the various sizes of stashers opened up a whole new world of food storage and cooking options. The medium and large stand-up pouches are now our preferred way of making popcorn for movie nights, because after the popcorn has been made right in the stasher, you can easily store the bag right next to us on the couch thanks to its flat bottom. The snack bag is perfect for a small amount of vegetables, nuts, or fruit, or that tiny bit of chopped onion that you didn’t add to the pan at the end. The half gallon was amazing for keeping large leftovers and we can’t wait to try making sous vide with it.
The stasher bags have a simple, squeezable seal that is airtight to keep food or leftovers fresh. We’ve never seen a spill or leak on our stasher bags, but to check, we filled the pint bag with water and turned it upside down, shaken and squeezed, and not a single drop came out (while working we did found that you can fill it with hot water to use as a heating pad or freeze it to use as an ice pack!).
Kai Burkhardt / CNN
Stasher bags
Stasher bags are a bit expensive upfront – the standard sandwich bag is $ 11.99 – but they last for years and replace who knows how many boxes of plastic bags. And if you accidentally drill a hole in them or they reach the end of their useful life, you can send them back to Stasher where they will be recycled through TerraCycle.
Even if Stasher bags are the only sandwich size, we’d still recommend them as a great way to cut down on your single-use plastic waste. However, thanks to the wide variety of shapes and sizes from Stasher, they are so much more than just a substitute for a plastic bag. They meet so many different needs and they really are an amazingly versatile tool to have in your kitchen.