Create This DIY Grocery Bag Dispenser That Will Make Your Long Road Trips A Breeze

If you're spending hours in a car, driving to your dream city, or exploring a popular road trip route, staying comfortable is key. You'll need to pack the essentials to ensure that you — and the small space in your vehicle — stay clean, functioning, and ready for emergencies. However, it's crucial to keep your items organized to save space and time during your trip. Enter the easy, super practical DIY grocery bag dispenser hack.

First things first: Don't throw away those extra plastic bags before your road trip. Disposable shopping bags can serve multiple functions, from acting as an on-the-go garbage receptacle to saving the day when you get car sick. Besides preventing mess, grocery bags also work to help divvy up snacks; round up must-have goods (such as sunscreen and water bottles) in one place; and, of course, contain your convenience store and gas station purchases.

Given how useful grocery bags can be during a road trip, it's a good idea to pack several and dispose of any that get dirtied along the way. And to keep them all together, make sure to construct your DIY dispenser before hitting the road. All you need is an empty tissue box.

This DIY grocery bag dispenser idea is so simple that you'll wonder why you never thought of it yourself. Take an empty cardboard tissue box — the kind with an opening on top — and insert your first plastic bag, keeping its handles sticking out. Take the bottom of your second grocery bag and place it through the handles of the first, again keeping the handles at the top. Hook and fold the bottom of the second bag around the first so that, when you pull one bag out, the next one will also pop out of the box (similar to how tissues are folded together inside tissue boxes).

Repeat the process with as many bags as you have, pushing the grocery bags into the box as you go. When you reach your last bag, keep the handles sticking out of the opening so you can easily reach and pull it out when needed.

Finally, place the tissue box in an accessible spot in your car, such as in the glove compartment or the backseat. When you get new bags, put them in the box to keep your car mess-free, and never waste time digging around your trunk for an old grocery bag again.