Grocery store plastic bags never go to waste in my house. A few are used carrying small items (snacks, small books, USB drives) back and forth to work. The majority are used as small trash liners in the bedroom and bathroom trash cans. Trash day, they get emptied, or neatly tied up and put in the big trash bag.
Sometimes I’ll put on a plastic glove and pickup the dry doggie turds in the backyard. They go straight into a grocery bag, tied, then doubled bagged, and put into my wheelie bin. If I wipe off my greasy lawn mower or other items in the garage those rags go into a grocery bag and into the wheelie bin.
They are so incredibly useful.
Wouldn’t you know it. :rolleyes: Some jerk in our Legislative session wants to ban them. Hopefully it won’t pass. If it does then I’ll have to buy small trash can bags and exactly the same thing. A waste of my money and natural resources. I suspect most people reuse these bags just like I do.
I also use them primarily for dog-poop pick up. With three dogs, I go through them pretty quickly! I also use them for the bathroom trash can and for trash bags in my truck and van.
Also I have a friend who is a decorative painter and she uses vast quantities of plastic bags for some of the finishes she does. Enough that even though she has a family of four, she regularly solicits plastic shopping bags from people she knows.
I’d be upset if they were banned.
Most plastic grocery bags which make it into our house eventually wind up with this fate. We do use re-usable grocery bags, as well, but it always seems like we have just enough plastic bags in the house for daily litter box cleaning.
I should clarify, by Legislative session, I meant a proposal in the Arkansas Legislature. Although I’ve read similar laws have/are considered in other states.
Seriously. There can’t be many people who just throw plastic grocery bags away without reusing them at all, can there? I mean, they take up hardly any space since you can cram a zillion of 'em into one bag, and there’s about a million and one uses for them.
I know I’ve never just thrown one away without reusing it, except if they’re torn or have holes… Ya know, a more sensible and productive legislation would do something about the all-to-common holes! If it weren’t for them, even less of those bags would go to waste.
Yep, use 'em all the time, sometimes run out of 'em. They line small trash cans, line the diaper bin, get filled with cat crap, and my husband uses them to haul his lunch and running clothes to and from work.
I throw a lot of them away. We get so many. We use them, for various things, and sometimes return a huge bag of them to the store for recycling. But still, I bet I throw 25 to 50 away each month.
No plastic bags at all in San Francisco, and it’s 10 cents for a paper bag at any store. We are required to sort our trash into landfill, recycling and compost, and compost has to go into special compostable bags. We do have a 77% waste diversion rate, compared to 27% in 1990.
I stopped accumulating any extra bags for kitchen garbage can lining when I switched to reusable bags, and now there’s a fee for plastic bags at stores here anyway. I still have enough to last for awhile for kitchen garbage can lining. I probably use 2 small trash bags a week, what with judicious recycling and composting. I never much used them for animal waste because they have holes in the bottom, and I have other plastic bags I can use for that, like bread bags, newspaper bags, etc. Once I run out of my accumulated stash, I’m not sure how I’ll line the kitchen garbage can. I could go shopping every so often in the next town where the bags aren’t banned yet, I guess.
I usually recycle them. The grocery store has a big barrel that you can dump them in for recycling, and the local pet store I shop at will take them and reuse them.
This seems silly to me.
So, you have to purchase several different containers to sort your trash. Plus you have to buy separate bags for food, dog poop, compost. Most of which are probably made in China, which doesn’t make any sense at all from a global green perpective. And ultimately, who pays for the bottle and can buy-back programs? Who makes money from the recycle color coded bin mandate?
Who pays for the added cost for restaurant take-away containers?
Who pays for the added cost for managing constrution clean up?
I pay zero for my local trash company to remove my trash every week. It’s included with other basic services.