SPANISH FORT, Ala. — Eight hundred plastic grocery bags go into a single mat. Ten women at a Spanish Fort senior living community have been collecting them, cutting them and crocheting them for long enough that the arithmetic no longer intimidates anyone.
The mats go to people sleeping outdoors.
A Project That Moved In With a New Resident
What is now a regular gathering at Westminster Village started somewhere else entirely, and arrived by way of a single person changing addresses.
“A resident moved in that had lived out in Lillian at the Methodist Church in Lillian,” said Westminster Village resident Pattilynne Skeele. “When she moved to Westminster, she found out I was a crocheter, and I came over here once with her. Evelyn taught me how to do these, and then the rest is kind of history.”
The project at Lillian Methodist Church is still running. It simply gained a second location.
How a Grocery Bag Becomes a Mat
The material is called plarn — plastic yarn, made from ordinary grocery bags.
The process is straightforward and labor-intensive. Bags are cut into strips. The strips are tied end to end into a continuous length. That length is then crocheted the way conventional yarn would be, into a mat roughly the size of a sleeping pad.
Ten women at Westminster Village work through the steps together.
The supply problem solves itself in a community of that size.
“It takes 800 grocery bags to make one mat,” Skeele said. “So we’re lucky we live in a place where there are 400 residents because everybody saves garbage bags for us.”
Four hundred residents each setting aside bags they would otherwise throw out turns a daunting input requirement into a steady, distributed collection effort where no single person has to do much.
What the Mats Do
Plarn has specific properties that make it suited to this use, and they are the reason the mats are worth the labor.
Plastic does not absorb water the way fabric does. A mat left on wet ground or caught in rain does not soak through, stay damp, or develop the mildew that makes a blanket unusable. It can be rinsed off. It provides a physical barrier between a person and cold, wet concrete or soil — and ground contact is one of the fastest ways a body loses heat.
Rev. Ashley Wilkinson Meyer, assistant director at Bright Bridge Ministries, described the value in plainer terms.
“For these folks that are coming in and unfortunately are living on the streets to have something like this plarn mat, which provides a little bit of cushion if they’re sitting or if they’re sleeping,” Meyer said. “If they just need to take a moment. It’s wonderful to have these.”
The Delivery
Several times a year, Skeele makes the drive from Spanish Fort to bring the finished mats to Bright Bridge Ministries.
Meyer said what strikes her is less the object than the chain of people behind it.
“It’s incredible to know that everybody has a part that they can play in restoring dignity and restoring humanity and being a source of compassion and encouragement and love in our community,” she said.
Putting a Number on Donated Time
Meyer offered a figure that reframes what a mat represents.
Valuing the volunteers’ time at roughly $33 an hour, she said, makes each mat about a $180 investment of labor.
That kind of valuation is standard practice in the nonprofit sector, where independent estimates of the value of volunteer time are used to account for contributed labor in annual reports and grant applications. The point is not that anyone is being paid. It is that donated hours are a real resource with a measurable value, and organizations that rely on them are operating with more than their cash budget suggests.
Applied here, it means a stack of grocery bags headed for a landfill, plus donated hours, produces something with genuine worth at close to zero cash cost.
“I think that’s probably my favorite thing about this story,” Meyer said. “Just to see all the different people who have come together, you know, to create these plarn mats. Like what a gift.”
How to Learn the Craft
Bright Bridge is inviting people to join them and learn how to crochet plarn mats during the East Hill makers market this fall. The ministry will be there October through December.
For anyone who wants to help without making mats, the entry point is simpler still: save the bags.