There’s nothing worse than an opened bag of chips that are now stale, right? Turn a pants hanger into bag clips!

Do you have a closetful of empty plastic pants hangers? You know, those ones that came home with those new pairs of pants, but you don’t use because they don’t slide easily on your closet rod? Well, here’s the super simple way to make bag clips from plastic pants hangers!

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Between my husband, myself, and our 3 kids, we have acquired a bunch of those plastic pants hangers.

We recently moved and I really didn’t want to lug all those hangers with us.

I don’t know about you, but as a professional organizer, I hate using those kind of hangers because they never seem to slide easily on our closet rods and get tangled up with the regular hangers, leaving all the clothes wrinkled and hard to grab.

I gave a bunch away but I realized those clips could be pretty useful for other things. And after finding the 9,756,899th left-open bag of potato chips (I did mention I have 3 kids, right…) I had an idea!

I asked my husband to do a little surgery on the hangers and now we have really great bag clips.

Here is how to turn a pants hanger into bag clips! It’s easy!

Here is what the hangers look like before we cut them apart.

Step 1 for how to turn a pants hanger into bag clips.

Just use a hacksaw and cut them right where the clip part attaches to the long piece of the hanger.

If you have the stiffer plastic, you may be able to simply bend it back and forth over and over until it snaps, but these hangers were a more flexible plastic and had to be cut.

We used a hacksaw to do the cutting. Here are some action shots 😉

And here’s what they look like when cut off.  Kind of rough along the edge.

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Step 2 for how to turn a pants hanger into bag clips.

Once you’ve cut the clip parts off of the straight part of the hanger, use a utility knife or metal file to smooth the rough edge of the cut side.

My husband just trimmed off a small bit at a time.  Since we were both in scouting, I just want to point out that yes, he should be cutting AWAY from his hand, but he is quite the handyman and felt comfortable doing it this way.

Being the good Girl Scout I am, I cut away from my hand… 😇

Step 3.

If, after trimming, the edges still feel rough, you can use a piece of fine grit sandpaper to smooth them. We didn’t need to do that, but I thought I’d include this just in case.

And finally, step 4 for how to turn a pants hanger into bag clips.

Drum roll, please! Your bag clips are ready to be used!

Once you have the cut edge smoothed out, it’s ready to be used as a clip, and I find these much stronger and able to hold a thicker bag shut better than the all-plastic ones we have.

But since these clips are so strong, you can use them to keep any type of bag closed. They work great for the bag inside cereal boxes, or any other type of bag as well.

Since we are talking about repurposing clothes hanger clips into bag clips, here are some terrific ways to repurpose and reuse cereal boxes, too!

So, there’s your recycling tip for the day 🙂

Need some more recycling tips? Here are 50 easy ways to recycle!

~ Pam