A friend reuses his plastic bags from stores. He uses them for garbage bags, mainly. Aside from the inarguable point that every little thing helps, and if EVERYbody did it, etc. etc. , how much oil would be saved, how many landfills would have more space, etc., if, say, 10% of households did this? Seems like the value of such acts is more in feeling virtuous than in actually making much difference. Inform and discuss, please. xo, C.
Considering how slowly Plastic bags breakdown, getting more than one use out of them will add up if enough people would start doing it. The Oil saved is not significant in the overall Oil consumption of America. I believe Plastics consume only a small percentage of Oil. < 5%[sup]1[/sup]. There is the additional cost of Oil/Coal burnt to produce the electricity to produce the plastic and Oil burned as Diesel to deliver the bags. There is an entire cycle to the plastic bags other than just using them to take groceries home. 
So if only 10% of households did reuse the bags the reduction in oil consumption in a year would be less than 1% but if 75% of the country reused, we might actually reduce oil consumption by a full 1%.
- Now combine this with Alternate Energy sources, (I have a 6700 watt Solar panel system on my roof).
- Recycling Bottles and Cans and Paper.
- Pushing for a higher standard of Fuel efficiency in Cars, Trucks and Jets.
- Hybrid and Hydrogen Cars
- Increased composting
- Buying Energy Star compliant devices, especially Large Appliances.
- Etc.
The complete process would make a significant difference.
Jim
1 Someone more knowledgeable can supply the exact figure; this should be accurate enough for conjecture
I’m all in favor of recycling plastic bags - I do so myself, quite faithfully. But I’m skeptical that plastic bags account for anything like 1% of oil consumption.
You could bypass plastic grocery bags altogether. When I go to the grocery, I take 3 really big canvas tote bags. They hold at least as much as 6 plastibags, and we’ve been using them for years.
Be skeptical, you are probably correct.
I am also skeptical we will ever get 75% of household to recycle plastic bags.
I was playing loose with figures to really make a point that it is only the complete package of reduce, reuse & recycle that will make a difference. That was the point of my note.
Jim
I reuse my plastic bags as garbage bags because I can’t see the point in buying other plastic bags only to throw my empty grocery bags into them. I still have to buy large garbage bags, of course, but those little plastic bags can be pretty useful.
There i snothing wrong with using them as garbage bag. They make pretty good ones and you can buy little trash cans made for them. That is cheap and easy recycling.
However, I would WAG that plastic bags make up way less than 1% of oil consumption. Take all of your plastic bags used in a week and wad them up in a tight ball. Realize that only part of those bags are made from petroleum. Now picture that partial little ball next to the gas in your car that you used that week, the oil that was used to heat your house, the gas to transport products to you, and every other plastic item that you bought that week.
They make great liners for small pails and my supermarket also has a recycle bin for Plastic bags. I also reuse them as bags.
I recycle batteries.
I use solar power to partially power my house.
I compost my leaves and grass clippings.
I recycle the few Newspapers I buy now. (Internet is now my news source)
I recycle cans and bottle, Glass & Plastic.
I reuse a lot of stuff by turning it into something new.
My next car will probably be a hybrid, once I drive my Ford Focus Wagon into the ground. (2-3 more years)
I am a lifetime member of a local environmental group.
Jim
I went hiking in a open space preserve a few miles from a landfill that serves a very largely populated city, and I stopped counting the number of plastic bags I saw on my 2-mile hike after 50 (I think I wasn’t even halfway up the hike). I also saw a bag swirling in the wind a few times. We were even upwind from the landfill (in the Bay Area, we almost always get wind blowing from the same direction, the N-NW).
No, we prob would not save much oil or much landfill space if 10% of households reused these plastic bags. But if 50% did, and another 10% brought their own cloth bags to the store, the lands around landfills would look certainly look nicer. Besides the trash and the oil and the landfill space, there’s other things to consider. If you live in an area inhabited by sea turtles, I imagine the chances of turtles choking on plastic bags (mistaken for jellyfish) would decrease somewhat.
Besides, you can’t say “Aside from the inarguable point that every little thing helps.” Sometimes, that is the real point.
We use one per day for cat shit collection/disposal and I also cut them into ribbons and use them for padding when I mail CDs. They also make great cat toys. I use them to line my bathroom and office waste baskets.
If your garbage goes to a waste to energy plant they you are getting the benefit of the oil and getting rid of the bag forever.
I think the ‘reducing environmental damage’ argument is the most powerful one ie that animals eat them and choke etc. They really do cause quite a bit of damage there, and the non-biodegradable aspect can be significant as well.
“Seems like the value of such acts is more in feeling virtuous than in actually making much difference”
To an extent, theres certainly the ‘I dont use plastic bags but own an SUV’ kind of mentality but we all have to start somewhere, and making the first action easy is often a good way to get something started.
Raising awareness in a community is a gradual process rather than a sudden changeover kind of thing.
Otara
You know there are major issues with Garbage incinerators I hope.
Lots of heavy metals going into the air.
Highly Toxic Ash left over.
Little thing like that.
Read up on it a little please.
Jim
Let me assure you I have and many waste to energy plants are cleaner then coal power plants.
San Francisco just recently debated a fee per bag, because they figured them to be a big waste on several fronts, not least of which that they have to ship their garbage to other ciry’s landfills.
I didn’t hear if it passed, failed, or is being reworded as we speak.
But I did hear that there were complaints mainly from elderly pedestrians, of which the city has many.
My own suggestion would be to outlaw certain wasteful usages. Like my drugstore always double bags a gallon of milk. But that just makes it harder to carry than just using its built-in handle. And they try to bag those long twelve packs of soda that have built in handles.
But if you want to see the actual amount of plastic being used or saved, look at the thick wads of bags they pull them from. There’s dozens of bags in an inch. Your saved bag stash looks huge, but if crushed back to the original size you would not be as impressed by how much you had.
Agreed.
Recycling in general is not effective in reducing consumption of natural resources. Well, every little bit helps and all that. But the contents of the family recylcing bin isn’t going to make a noticable dent in resource consumption. Reuse on the other hand…
However, we recycle and reuse our grocery bags for the excellent reason that saving even a few from being released into the environment will make many people happy. It is worth a lot of effort to keep the litter down.
But don’t you then have to purchase plastic gargbage bags?
All the stores in our area have a return box out front to place the old bags into when you return. We just keep them in a basket out in the garage till it is full and then take the whole lot back to the store where it came from.
In addition, we use them in our waste baskets in both bathrooms and as light weight space fillers in shipping packages. Slightly wadded up bags keep the contents from shifting around. I also carry a couple on dog walks for picking up poopies.
At the risk of ridicule, we wash our “Slide-Lock” type baggies and re-use them; generally several times. I have been accused of being cheap but it is in fact an attempt at recycling and minimizing the amount of oil-based waste we generate.
We recycle our aluminum cans and newspapers and cut up the ring-things that come on a six-pack of soda.
Oh, and we never use styrofoam plates or containers. 
Imasquare writes:
> But don’t you then have to purchase plastic gargbage bags?
I buy strictly garbage bags made from recycled plastic. I’m careful to always completely fill them, so I only need one for about eight days of garbage. I use my own cloth bags for nearly every purchase, not just for groceries. (I suspect that I can get my set of cloth bags to last somewhere between ten and fifteen years.) Much of the time at stores (other than grocery stores) I can just say, “No bag please,” and they just hand me the item. I acquire a few plastic bags a week from the bag that the newspaper comes in when it’s wet outside and from the bag from carry-out meals. I occasionally use the few bags I get for carrying things and storing things. I put all the other bags in a large paper sack in the kitchen closet. I estimate that it will take me about fifteen years to acquire enough bags (beyond those I use for other things) to fill up that paper sack, and at that point I will ball up the bags and bring them to the grocery store where they have a place to recycle plastic bags. Yes, I’m bringing some plastic into the world with my occasional uses of plastic bags, but I’m probably using about half as much as someone who never thinks about cutting down on the use of plastic.
Sometime I’ll tell you how I make sure I use much less styrofoam than most people.
1 plastic bag multiplied by 1 billion people (just North America, Europe, Japan and Australia), multiplied by 100 (about 2 bags a week for one year) and you (rbroome) call recycling plastic bags ineffective in reducing consumption of natural resources ??
I also read it takes 1 quart of oil to make a plastic bag (material + manufacturing).