A Solution That’s in the Bag : Environment: San Diego-area woman is at tip of a trend with canvas shopping bags that are replacing plastic and paper.

Claudia Armstrong of Solana Beach hadn’t really planned to get into the manufacturing business.

“It was just one of those little ideas that comes along quietly,” she says of the canvas shopping sack she stitched up a couple of months ago, using a paper grocery bag as a pattern and sponging on a green “Treesavers” logo with watercolors.

But her little idea came along at a good time.

Armstrong, promoting her canvas bag as a way out of the “paper or plastic” environmental quandary facing grocery shoppers, started with Casady’s in Encinitas, her neighborhood food store, where they sold 20 bags the first week.

“It made sense to us,” said Manager Derek Casady. “If people would invest in a bag and use it over and over again, it would save resources and maybe save our landfills. We’d had a vague impression that customers were thinking along these lines, but Claudia really crystallized our thinking.”

Knocking on grocery store doors and mailing out samples, Armstrong has continued to crystallize thinking. Her Treesaver bags now are sold in 45 Southern California stores. She is working with distributors in the Midwest and Northern California, and her sales are “multiplying daily to the point where I sometimes get orders for 1,000 bags in one day,” she said. “Right now, I’m almost overwhelmed.”

Her success story is not unique. The canvas tote--long applauded for its sturdy performance as book bag, school bag, bike bag and logo bag for museums and ecology groups--is appearing nationwide in the new role of grocery sack.

For some pioneers, this is validation.

“We call canvas the ‘third alternative’ (to paper or plastic) and it’s working beautifully,” declares Charmian Kulka, 61, of Sebastapol. An ardent environmentalist, she is designing a grocery logo bag as a fund-raiser for her environmental group, Sebastapol Tomorrow.

She thinks they will tap an emerging market. “I’ve been shopping with two canvas bags for a long time--I just keep them in the car--and it occurred to me that we could use these for fund-raising, because they are so cheap to make,” she said. “There’s a lot of new interest up here in reusing bags.”

Not only are consumers looking for alternatives, supermarket executives are rethinking how best to get groceries from checkout counter to customer car without destroying trees or clogging landfills.

In Berkeley, Kim Marienthal and his sister Penny--whose Save A Tree Co. has sold canvas bags for almost 20 years to environmental groups, natural food stores and food co-ops--report that mainstream grocery stores have started coming aboard in the last two to three months.

“We’re getting about 15 inquiries a day now, and that’s a lot for us,” Marienthal said of his firm’s sacks, priced for less than $10. “The orders are coming from small towns all across the country. We just started selling to a supermarket chain in Oklahoma which ordered nearly 1,000 bags. It’s booming. It’s very exciting for us.”

A cottage industry is undergoing a revival, says Tod Whitaker, a staffer at “Seventh Generation: Products for a Healthy Planet” in Colchester, Vt. “There is nothing new about the canvas bag. It is just being put to a new purpose. People have decided they are tired of throwing away plastic and paper.”

As a buyer for a major catalogue featuring environmental products (circulation 3 million), Whitaker has a bird’s-eye view of consumer whims and trends. His company long has featured a string shopping bag, popular in Europe, and “these are going like crazy--all of a sudden everybody wants them,” he said. They don’t offer a canvas model yet but expect to add one. “I have about 10 varieties that people have sent me, just over the last few months.”

Most bag samples come from entrepreneurs like Claudia Armstrong.

“The major manufacturers aren’t coming out with environmental products yet,” Whitaker said. “But a lot of the supermarkets are concerned, starting with the small chains. They offered the biodegradable plastic bags and then realized that wasn’t the real solution.

“So it’s really starting at the grass-roots level, with people who are out there to change things,” he added. “It’s a real groundswell of people pushing industry to get their act into gear.”

In Solana Beach, Armstrong, 44, doesn’t aspire to be a major industry force. Designing an earth-friendly bag seemed a natural thing to do, she says. For her family (husband Davitt and son Davitt, 10), “environmental awareness has always been a household theme,” she said. “I love the earth. I was raised in Los Angeles and went to Colorado to be a ski bum for a year and stayed for 18 years because I was absolutely in awe of the environment. . . . “

When someone mentioned in casual conversation last November that friends in Canada made bags for grocery shopping, Armstrong told herself, “We should all be doing that.”

With $1,000 capital on her BankAmericard, she went to work, designing not only a bag (which sells for $6 wholesale) but an entire marketing package. The Treesaver bags come equipped with their own display case (hatrack-type stands built by her husband), a logo and an environmental fact sheet that pulls no punches. “Paper bags arrive at the store via a tragic chain of events, beginning with the destruction of acres and acres of virgin forest and ending with increased pollution of the air and water around us by pulp mills,” it states.

For Armstrong, meeting the demands put on an environmental entrepreneur has its problems: “I have to make sure my packaging is recycled material and my business cards are on recycled paper. I had to call 10 printers to get my letterhead on recycled paper.”

But as she makes the rounds, meeting her regulars and developing new accounts, she is getting lots of support from customers.

Boney’s Marketplace, a six-store specialty health-food chain in San Diego, long has been concerned about trash reduction and wants to “get the ball rolling” on canvas bags, spokesman Mike Darr said. “We’re trying out the display in different stores to see what response we get.

“I like the concept” of the canvas bags, he said, adding, “You can argue forever about paper being better than plastic, but neither one is that great environmentally. Boney’s is not a big company, and we don’t have a big ad budget to promote these, but this is a start. Claudia is doing her part and we need more people like her.”

Armstrong also has sold her bags to one chain: Big Bear Supermarkets, a retail leader in environmental programs that was the nation’s first chain to announce a change from plastic to recycled paper grocery bags. It is carrying Treesavers in four of its 25 San Diego stores.

“We saw (offering canvas sacks) as a logical step--to us, providing a bag is a customer service,” said Tom Dahlen, executive vice president of Big Bear. “The simple premise is that she has a bag that encourages people to reuse it and encourages the concept of recycling. So we are just promoting her concept.”

And what is the customer response to the canvas bags?

“It’s ironic you should call,” he said, “because we just had about 10 inquiries this morning from people asking where they could get them. As long as she wants to produce them, we’ll stock them.”