A Rothesay business owner is crocheting plastic bags into mats for the homeless.
Renee Outhouse, owner of Byers Boutique, said she was looking for a way to give back to the community when she happened across the idea on social media.
“I really didn’t have any kind of ideas as to I wanted to do, and then one night as I was scrolling through Facebook, I had come across a video of a group of women who had done mats like this in the States,” she said.
From there, Outhouse took bags she already had in her house to practice crocheting with. When she ran out of bags, she asked for more from her customers through social media. Those customers who brought in bags received 15 per cent off their next purchase.
She said she doesn’t like that the Fundy Regional Service Commission announced it would stop recycling plastic bags as of March, and that was why she’s coming up with ways to reuse the bags, but she does understand why that decision was arrived at.
“The big problem that we’re having is that when people turn in recycling, not everybody rinses things out and puts in clean recyclable items, which then soils the whole lot,” said Outhouse.
She said that means all the items must be washed and sorted to see what is recyclable and it makes it too much of a process.
Outhouse said the crocheted mats are sturdy, so she hopes they’ll last for a while, but if they do wear out, she hopes there’s a solution for recycling them.
“I’m hoping by that point we have a solution for recycling plastic bags. But if we don’t, I do not have a plan in place for that, I just want to keep them out of the landfill as much as possible,” she said.
Outhouse said she has four feet of a mat completed so far, but she’s run out of bags. She hopes to crochet 10 this year.
“But once I get the donations, start making the mats, the idea is that depending on how many we have, we’re going to go to the shelters in Saint John and I will be handing out, trying to disperse them evenly. So that if they have to turn people away, then they can provide them with one of these mats.”
