The little plastic bread clip
by Liesl Clark
Much of our store-bought bread comes in a plastic bag (recyclable at most grocery stores, if clean) with a hard plastic clip to keep it shut. These clips also make their appearance occasionally on produce bags. Some call them bag clips, others bag tags. They’re made of hard plastic and as of yet we know no community that accepts them for recycling. If yours does, please let us know in the comments section below.
For some fun bread clip robot reprintables, please visit Mich L in LA’s blog, which is an inspirational site for repurposing our “trash” into artful creations.
Go check out these re-printable posters at MichLinLA.com!
But seriously, do you truly know the classification of your bag clips? If you’d like to learn more about those rectangular tabs, perhaps this British Medical Journal “morphology” chart will help you. Their chart is hilarious — I think. Don’t swallow them, or you might become yet another statistic for this study.
Reduce Your Use: Before we show you the fun and useful things one can do with bread clips, we’d like to wean you from accumulating them in the first place. How? Buy fresh bread packaged in paper or make your own! With modern bread-makers it’s not so hard anymore. And you can usually find a free one up-for-grabs on Freecycle. Here’s a foolproof bread recipe my family has been using for years. We make nearly a loaf a day and have saved bundles on our grocery bill.
Reuse It: Bread clips are now the rage. So, it behooves you to save a few for around the house.
1) Use them as earbud tamers to store those earbuds and prevent the inevitable tangles.
2) Use them as counter scrapers for hard-to -scrape -off crud. Same for pots and pans.
Bred clip turned into counter scraper to scrape off wax drippings or other stuck-on stuff.
3) Use to hold together all your rubber bands in your everything drawer.
Using a bread clip to hold together those loose rubber bands.
4) Make a cool cereal box and bread clip abacus by following this tutorial provided by Almost Unschoolers!
Almost Unschoolers’ Amazing Bread Clip Abacus
5) Use your bread clips to organize and label your desk and entertainment cables.
6) Make bread clip monsters like these at Crafts by Amanda.
Bread Clip Tags Make Fun Monsters.
7) Make bread clip snowmen a la Crafts by Amanda, and impress your housemates.
Bread Clip Snowmen by Crafts by Amanda
8) Label your spare keys with them!
Label your spare keys with a bread tag.
9) Place on the end of tape, like duct tape and masking tape, so you don’t have to spend time peeling the tape off itself.
Clever tape tag: Reuse a bread clip as your convenient tape end-finder.
10) Make bread clip gingerbread men!
Bread Tag Gingerbread Men by Crafts by Amanda
11) Use them to hold hair ties in the bathroom.
Bread clips make great hair tie holders.
12) Learn how to make a robot necklace from Mich L in LA.
Bread Clip Robot by Mich L in LA
13) Make some more fine jewelry.
14) Here’s a pendant for some more ideas.
15) Get others inspired with your bread clip art.
16) Use them to hold your twist ties in your reusable grocery bag for bulk items.
Use bread clips to hold your twist ties.
17) Flip flop about to blow out? Use a bread tag on the bottom to hold the little end in place for a quick reinforcement fix.
18) For some more ideas, visit Whole Living Daily for their top 10 reuses.
Not tired yet of bread clip ideas? Find more on our Trash Backwards app!
Bread Clip Reuses at App.TrashBackwards.com
Please submit your own ideas, here, or through our crowd-sourcing tool, for other Trash Backwards followers to glean the wonderful reuses of the lowly little bread clip!
So many great uses! Love this post – esp. the tip about using them on the end of a roll of tape. Thanks much for including me in your cool bread clip roundup!
I save my bread clips specifically for the purpose of tip #9. Life changer! ~M.
Yes! And time-saver, too. Thanks, Redesigned.
Pretty nice post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wished to say that
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Hang on a second: “tip #9. Life changer”? Surely nobody EVER had a life so feeble that a tape marker made from a bread tag changed it?
They are now recyclable in the UK by over 150 authorities that have opted to collect plastic fruit trays and burger boxes etc. They take back polystyrene material which has recycling category 6 – and clips are uncontaminated category6!
This is great news!!
Can you buy them?
Hi Barbara. I’m sure you can buy bread clips. But why bother? They’re easy to collect and if you joined your local Buy Nothing group, you could ask members to save theirs for you!