I can’t believe no one has said shoes yet. Any shoes that go into something else (gym bag, luggage) get put into a plastic bag first to keep whatever is on the bottom off of the clothes. Also used for wet &/or dirty clothes for the same reason. I take lunch in them. If a container leaks, it’s much easier to throw out the bag than to wash out an insulated bag. Recycling goes into some & extras get returned to store for them to recycle. Don’t use them to clean up after the pooch because of the holes. For that, I, ahem, ‘acquire’ extra produce bags at the grocery store.
Same with me. I have entirely too many uses for them.
Which is interesting, because in my part of MD, they have been charging for these bags, in order to help the environment.
I usually use them to wrap my baby’s dirty diapers up. I then throw them in the trash bag. Believe it or not it doesn’t smell and it really controls the odor.
We use plastic shopping bags for garbage exclusively. In Toronto proper, stores are required to charge 5 cents for a plastic bag, but I don’t think that’s the case for the outlying areas like York region, so we still get freebies from time to time.
I have mixed feelings about a possible plastic bag ban (Toronto just killed such a proposed ban). On the one hand, I feel the same as you – that if you ban them, people will just use something else that’s equally bad for the environment. But on the other hand, I think experience has shown that if people have to pay for a resource vs. having it for free, then they tend to waste it less. So if I had to pay for garbage can liners, I might be more likely to collect one big bag of garbage instead of a bunch of small bags, for instance.
Actually, wouldn’t the most likely result of a plastic bag ban be that more stores begin using paper bags? Then I could use those instead (our wet garbage already gets diverted to the compost bin).
I have enough re-uses for them (temporary storage/transport of items, litter scooping, wastebasket lining, etc.) that I’d be very unhappy if they were banned where I live.
Paper bags also have decent re-use (storage/transport as above, cat play, etc.), but I tend to find more uses for plastic.
I’m too much of a ditz for re-usable bags. If they manage to make it back out to the car, they languish in the trunk and I forget to take them into the store.
I don’t know how much those little trash can liners sell for, but here’s what I use instead now that I can’t get plastic bags from my grocery store anymore:
$12.60 for 1000 of them, so even with shipping (Around $7.00 for me) it ends up being pretty economical, and I don’t have to worry about restocking very often.
In our neck of the woods, we have to pay $0.05 for plastic bags. We use them for kitty litter mostly.
What I do is when I go to No Frills (who have the best bags for durability and no holes, btw) I leave my reusables in the trunk and buy however many I need. I only do this when I notice that the stash of bags is low.
The reality is that to buy kitchen garbage bags (the cheapest kind) would be $0.10 and these bags are much higher quality than that.
If they would just let us compost kitty litter (some places can), I wouldn’t really use them at all and could use reusable bags exclusively.
(I don’t use liners in my garbage cans except in the kitchen where a grocery bag would not be big enough.)