Can You Create Your Own Custom-Sized Plastic Bags With a Hot Knife?

You know we get our best ideas from TikTok, and so when we saw this recent video asking for your favourite hack, we had to test it.

On its surface, this hack seems reckless and dangerous. You heat up a chef’s knife on an open burner on your stove, and then slice through a resealable plastic bag. Supposedly, the heat from the knife will seal the sides of the bag, giving you a new half-sized bag that works just as well as the original.

Now, I would not normally recommend you heat up a sharp object at home until it is red-hot and then start hacking away at some bits of plastic, but this was for science.

Beyond if this hack actually works (which you can see in the video above), we questioned why anyone would need plastic bags of this size. Have you ever felt that your bag was just double the width you actually needed? Has anyone ever felt that a smaller bag would keep their food fresher? This is, of course, a technicality. We did not come here to espouse whether or not anyone would need this hack, but rather whether the social media video does what it claims.