Are Stasher bags worth it? Absolutely. Here’s why | CNN Underscored

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If you’re trying to live a more sustainable life, finding truly useful eco-friendly swaps can be harder than you think. That’s why when we discover genuinely great and useful eco-friendly products like Swedish dishcloths, we become obsessed. Well, there’s good news, because we’ve found another sustainable swap that we just can’t shut up about: Stasher bags.

Stasher makes a lot of claims about what these little wonder bags can do, so we got a handful of our own in various sizes to try them out. We packed them, washed them, microwaved them, froze them and boiled them to see if they really stack up. After it all, we can definitely say we’re never going to buy another Ziploc bag ever again.

Stasher bags are reusable bags made out of platinum-grade silicone, which is the highest quality of silicone. The bags are free of BPA, BPS and other phthalates, and they 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 store leftovers in the fridge, you can put them in the freezer, microwave, oven and even in boiling water without any worry of plastic or chemicals leaking into your food.

The possibilities with Stasher bags are seriously endless. You can freeze leftovers, pop popcorn in the microwave, reheat leftovers in the oven and even sous vide a perfect steak. They’re safer, more versatile and just plain better than a traditional plastic bag.

Stasher bags come in tons of different sizes and dozens of colors to fit all of your kitchen and storage needs. At Amazon, you can shop between the sandwich, snack, half-gallon and medium stand-up sizes, and on Stasher’s site there are additional options, including large and small stand-up sizes, a carabiner-equipped go bag and a tiny pocket bag. Plus, there’s a large list of bundles you can grab to start your Stasher collection.

We’ve had several sandwich Stasher bags for over a year and use them constantly, whether we’re packing lunch for a hike or storing leftover chili in the freezer. They’ve held up perfectly, and we’ve never noticed any weird taste from storing food in the bag.

We recently got our hands on a few more sizes, including the medium and large stand-ups, the half-gallon bag and the snack bag to see if they’re as good as the original. We’ve honestly been amazed at how the different sizes of Stashers open up a whole new world of food storage and cooking possibilities. The medium and large stand-up bags are now our favorite way to make popcorn for movie nights because after making the popcorn right in the Stasher, its flat bottom makes it easy to keep the bag right next to us on the couch. The snack bag is perfect for a small amount of veggies, nuts or fruit or that little bit of chopped onion you didn’t end up putting in the pan. The half-gallon has been amazing to store any large leftovers, and we can’t wait to try to sous vide with it.

The Stasher bags feature an easy, pinch-close seal that’s airtight to keep any food or leftovers fresh. We’ve never experienced any spillage or leaking with our Stasher bags, but to double check, we filled the half-gallon bag with water and turned it upside down, shook it and squeezed it, and not a single drop came out (while doing this we realized you could fill it with hot water to use as a heating pad or freeze it to use it as an ice pack!).

Stasher bags are a little pricey upfront — the standard sandwich bag goes for $11.99 each — but they’ll last for years to come, replacing who knows how many boxes of plastic bags. And, if you accidentally poke a hole in them or they reach the end of their life, you can send them back to Stasher where they’ll be recycled through TerraCycle.

Even if Stasher bags only had the single sandwich size, we’d still recommend them as a great way to reduce your single-use plastic waste. However, thanks to Stasher’s wide variety of shapes and sizes, they’re so much more than a plastic bag replacement. They fulfill so many different needs and are truly an amazingly versatile tool you need in your kitchen.