Green Retailer, ReusableBags.com, Named 2008 BizRate Circle of Excellence Gold Honoree
CHICAGO -- ReusableBags (www.reusablebags.com), an online retailer offering products to reduce mindless over-consumption of disposable items, was recently named a BizRate Circle of Excellence Gold Honoree. The company joins an elite group of e-commerce sites such as J&R, Abt.com, and Vanns and just one other green retailer rated the best-of-the-best by millions of Internet shoppers. Excellent ratings in seven categories earned ReusableBags a place among the honorees, including: Ease of Finding What You Are Looking For, On-Time Delivery, Overall Satisfaction, Selection of Products, Customer Support, Product Met Expectations and Repurchase Intent.
"We act as a change agent, empowering customers with a wide range of smart reusables," said Vincent Cobb, founder of ReusableBags. "We're leveraging information and the marketplace to help solve the problems of over-consumption - serving the customer on every level is at the core of that mission. It's a central part of the 'trusted-friend' brand we've established."
To be eligible for the award, retailers must participate in the BizRate Research Customer Certified Merchant Program. Millions of customers complete surveys at the point of sale and again after delivery of their order; the ratings determine which sites offer the best overall customer experience. Meeting the rigid criteria set by BizRate Research for delivering consistently excellent customer service places ReusableBags in the top 0.1% of online retailers: just 134 of the 111,341 stores participating in BizRate's customer service program were honored this year.
Since 2002, ReusableBags has been a major force in reducing consumption of use-and-toss items - providing a wide range of practical products that enable people to reduce, reuse and save, including their award-winning ACME Bags line. ReusableBags also provides facts and news from around the world, empowering people to take action and raise awareness about consuming less. ReusableBags is dedicated to the triple bottom line and donates 1% of sales through membership in 1% for the Planet. Recognized as leader and innovator, ReusableBags won Co-Op America's prestigious Green Business of the Year People's Choice Award in 2007 and has been featured in hundreds of news stories, including NPR's Marketplace, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and was endorsed in An Inconvenient Truth.
As of late 2008, ReusableBags has enabled 160,000+ customers to reduce their consumption of use-and-toss items by more than 500 million.
More information: www.reusablebags.com or www.shopzilla.com.
ReusableBags.com Tackles Plastic Bag Mess
--Launches Site Raising Awareness and Offering Pragmatic Solutions--
CHICAGO, Il. Introduced merely 25 years ago, plastic bags are accumulating in our environment at an alarming rate. They're everywhere: strewn along roadways, stuck in trees, and piled up beneath our kitchen sinks. ReusableBags.com - a proactive, eco-conscious website is helping battle this growing problem by raising awareness and offering effective, affordable, high-quality products for sale that help reduce plastic bag consumption.
An estimated 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are consumed world-wide every year. In the U.S. alone, an estimated 12,000,000 barrels of oil are required to produce the 100 billion consumed annually. Additionally, retailers spend an estimated $4 billion on their plastic store bags, passing the costs on to consumers.
A grass roots movement is gaining momentum worldwide as fed-up individuals, environmental groups, governments and visionary retailers pursue the common goal of reversing this nasty trend. The focus of these initiatives is to reduce consumption and encourage the use of reusable bags.
After researching the issue, I was amazed by the sheer volume and the growing negative impact on our environment, said Vincent Cobb, founder and owner of ReusableBags.com. I realized that using reusable shopping bags was a simple yet effective way to dramatically cut down on consumption, but it was impossible to find any place that offered a wide selection of durable ones that also looked good. Realizing he was not alone, Cobb's frustration transformed into motivation and ReusableBags.com was born.
ReusableBags.com's
Facts and
Newsroom sections inform consumers that although single use plastic bags are free to shoppers, the cost to society is enormous. Each year, billions of plastic bags end up as ugly, wind-blown litter. The site's
Gallery has dozens of telling photos showing plastic bags littering our countryside and great cities from Chicago to Paris. Also, despite the common belief that plastic bags decompose and disappear, they actually persist breaking down into toxic bits that pollute our oceans, rivers, lakes and soil. In addition, countless animals, most notably marine mammals, choke to death after mistaking plastic bags for food.
Forward-thinking environmental groups and governments suggest reusable shopping bags as an important part of the solution. ReusableBags.com makes finding the right reusable bags easy and convenient by offering consumers a hand-picked selection of the best available-- from innovative, ultra-compact ACME brand bags that easily fit in your pocket, to stylish hemp totes and organic cotton string bag sets complete with stuff sacks for neat storage and transportation. They even offer shopping sets complete with reusable produce bags thereby eliminating another source of bag waste, and a heavy-duty category that includes a bag that comes with a lifetime guarantee.
In addition to reusable bags, the site offers a number of accessories to help consumers "reduce and reuse" including organic cotton lunch bags and reusable sandwich wrappers that unfold into placemats; plastic bag dispensers for storing and reusing bags, made of Ecospun--a fabric produced from recycled plastic containers; message-based merchandise to help spread the word using the site's slogan "Plastic Bags Blow / BYOB" bring your own bag.
ReusableBags.com also busts myths such as "paper is better", "biodegradable bags are the answer" and "recycling can fix the problem" while providing useful news on global trends to diminish this menace. Things are starting to happen in the U.S. with over 30 Alaskan towns outright banning them and San Francisco pushing to implement a consumer based bag tax modeled after Ireland's enormously successful PlasTax.
Meanwhile, ReusableBags.com is making it easy for savvy consumers to make a difference. Says Cobb,
"By offering consumers a wide range of smart and stylish products to choose from, we dramatically increase the chances of getting consumers to embrace reusable shopping bags."
Visit www.reusablebags.com for more information.
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Note to reporters: Camera-ready art of ReusableBags.com's products is available upon request.
About ReusableBags.com
ReusableBags.com offers information, tips and products to help reduce the mindless consumption of plastic bags. By educating, raising awareness and offering sound solutions it empowers people to take action, spread the word, and start using reusable shopping bags. Visit www.reusablebags.com to learn more and check out the best in earth friendly reusable bags.
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