Take the Box Not the Bag

The ALDO Group is making a bold commitment to reduce waste. The bagless initiative encourages customers to opt for an eco-designed shoebox, eliminating 10 million single-use shopping bags and saving an estimated 11,000 trees per year. The initiative is implemented in corporate stores in Canada and the USA.

Over a decade ago, we introduced a shoebox with a rope as a first step to making our packaging more sustainable and guide our customers to better shopping habits. We now believe that our consumers are ready to accept our boxes as the solution to carry their shoes home. The elimination of single-use bags is a major step in our long-term commitment to sustainability and is just one piece of the puzzle we are working on.

We introduced our box with a built-in handle in 2008, making a bag obsolete! It is made from 80% post-consumer recycled materials, and is completely recyclable after you remove the rope.

Instead of using new materials, our reusable eco-tote is made from 80% recycled plastic bottles (rPET). The amount of plastic bottles present in a tote varies based on its size, and can be found on the tote's side. We've specially designed our tote to be reusable, decreasing the overall number of single-use bags in the environment.

Our eco-tote is made of a rPET body and polypropylene handle, designed to be reused as much as possible to minimize waste. Before you consider getting rid of our eco-tote, make sure you've gotten your maximum mileage out of it! Although we encourage you to recycle it at its end-of-life, reusable bags have recently been introduced on the market and may not have been identified as an accepted material for recycling yet. We encourage you to check if reusable bags are recyclable in your neighborhood.

We encourage you to adopt sustainable shopping practices by bringing your own bag to our stores to minimize waste. If you require a bag in store and did not bring your own, you can purchase our eco-tote for a small cost. The net proceeds will be donated to causes. We will no longer be carrying single-use bags in our stores.

Call It Spring gives back to our local communities in many ways and strives to be environmentally responsible through company-wide sustainable practices. Please visit responsibility.aldogroup.com for more information about our initiatives.

In the years preceding the bag phase out, Call it Spring gave away on average 1.7 million single-use bags per year. Through our bagless initiative, we predict we will reduce our shopping bag carbon footprint by 39% and save 2,300 trees every year, the equivalent of 31 million paper planes!