Don’t throw out your plastic bags; Harvest Hope Food Bank will gladly accept them

One local business heavily relies on plastic bags, and hopes you'll give them your bags instead of throwing them out.

Columbia, S.C. (WOLO) — Earlier this month, Richland County Council initially approved a ban on single-use plastic bags. It still has to be voted on two more times. One local business heavily relies on plastic bags, and hopes you’ll give them your bags instead of throwing them out.

“Plastic bags are really important to Harvest Hope Food Bank. We reuse 4,000 plastic bags a day through our 20 counties in South Carolina that we serve,” said Wendy Broderick, CEO of Harvest Hope Food Bank.

No plastic bag is wasted at Harvest Hope Food Bank. Thousands are used each day to help feed more than 2 million people each year.

“Bags to us, at this time, are extremely important to us, because right now it’s the only thing that we really have that serves the purpose to gather the food, tie it up, to give to the people,” said Luther Martin, a volunteer.

“We are encouraging community members to donate those bags back to us so that we can reuse them for a great cause,” said Broderick.

The food bank is always looking and accepting donations for plastic bags, that are reused to package the food and distribute it.

“They have sites where people can put them in and then those large boxes are brought to us,” said Martin. “I’m not too sure how we would be able to get the food to the people because we would have individual items in the carts.”

The Richland County Council will vote on the plastic bag ban in September. Harvest Hope says it supports the council’s decision, and will work on solutions if the ban is put in place.