My wife and I are opportunists. We go grocery shopping and when the teenage checkout person says paper or plastic we usually say - plastic. It’s the quickest and easiest. Well I guess there is no easy way to say what we reuse the bags for - We reuse the bags for our cat poop. Emptying the litter.
Thats it. We sometimes use them for bathroom garbage bags but not always…
So this past weekend in honor of our earth day, we bought orgainc, canvas shopping bags. 15 of them. We went for our first excursion this week to the grocer with the bags in the shopping cart. We got to the register and the kid said: paper or plastic, we handed him our bags, he passed them to the bagger and that was that. No fuss, no plastic, and one of the persons behind us even commented and said…“we should be doing that…”
It felt oddly gratifying.
How about you? Who uses what and why at the grocer?
I’ve started to bring my own shopping bags too. There are just too many plastic bags stuffed under the kitchen sink, which is really annoying me, and last week I got some plastic bags at Sobeys whose handles fell apart as I picked them up. I generally don’t buy that much stuff at one time anyways. It’s just a matter of a little thinking ahead.
That’s the thing, I suspect. Thinking ahead. Bringing your own bags means you planned to go shopping, and that goes against the ‘impulse buying’ mantality that the past decades have encouraged. So of course the retailers are reluctant to do it: they’re the same ones who put candy at kinds’ eye level so that the kids will impulse-buy or lean on their parents to impulse-buy.
I’d like to see actual cost breakdowns of how much profit comes from the impulse-buy temptation racks at the checkout stands.
I snap up resuable bags of all shapes, sizes, styles and materials whenever I can, and try to use those. It’s even gotten to the point that I leave about four of them in the car for those quick stops at the store on the way home from somewhere else. That’s cut down on our forgetfulness a lot.
I find freecycle is a great place to get free, reusable bags.
If we do forget our bags for whatever reason, which is rarer these days because of the stash in the car, it’s plastic. We used to use them for kitty litter, but now we use a flushable, corn-based litter, so now they get used for packing material, or recycled at the bins at the grocery store.
Speaking of bathroom and kitchen garbage bags, have you seen the compostable kitchen-catcher gerbage bags? My friends up north have them, and I’d never seen them before.
We’ve been using our own bags for some years now. We started with string bags, then switched to canvas, and now have a selection of string, canvas, and insulated bags. We bring the groceries directly home, but the insulated bags are very nice on hot days (it gets over 100 F here in North Texas). As a bonus, we don’t have to throw out a gazillion paper or plastic bags every now and then.
I’ve never had much luck using plastic shopping bags for disposing of cat litter. They always seem to have a few tiny holes in them, which dribble litter, and the last thing I want is litter dribbled all over the house on the way to the garbage can. So we use regular garbage bags for changing the litter box.
I have one big blue tarp-like bag (the blue ones you can get from Ikea), a canvas bag, and my back-pack. I also have a pair of 50 L paniers for my bike (like this one).
The supermarket where I shop offers 5 cents off for each of their paper bags you bring with you to re-use so I always grab a few of those on my way out. They even give the credit if you bring more bags than you need for the groceries (but annoyed me heartily once by not giving me credit for a bag from another store I grabbed inadvertantly). I try to remember to stow a few in the car as well. I try to avoid plastic bags but when I do get them I re-use them as garbage bags.
My mom found the most fantastic thing: a foldable shopping bag that shrinks down to about the size of two packs of Halls. You just toss it in your bag and carry it around all the time just in case.
If I’m planning a shop, I bring canvas bags; otherwise, I use paper, not just because it biodegrades but because I can get more groceries into a paper bag.
We use mostly reused plastic (the Aldi bags are great - thick, large and with handles), with a few canvas thrown in for good measure. We also request plastic, for impulse shopping when we don’t have bags with us, or when we’re running low at home (yes, people actually CAN run low on plastic grocery bags!) At home, we use them for lining each wicker wastebasket (uh…5 of 'em) and for cat litter. We simply double the bags to avoid the cat litter spillage problem.
At home, the grocery store is about a 20 minute walk, so I take a backpack, not only to be green but to save my fingers from the plastic bag handles.
Here, I usally just stop at the Tesco on the way back from class, and haven’t gotten organized enough to pack bags with me in the morning. I use the plastic bags though for trash bags, packing, storage, etc, which cuts down on the waste a bit.
I’d just have to buy boxes of small trash bags if I didn’t get them free with my purchase - Plastic for me. Only the occasional ripped one will not get reused at some point.
Same here. I reuse my plastic bags for carrying my lunch to work, lining wastebaskets, picking up icky stuff, etc. Ripped ones go into recycling, as do the ones I’ve used for carrying lunch or other non-icky reuses.
Plastic, and they all get recycled somehow. Usually as bathroom trash liners and the like. For scooping the cat box, I use used Zip-Lock bags. There are usually a few on the counter that last night held half an onion, the last roll, or something like that. The zipper means that I can toss the poop into the garbage and take it out on the normal schedule, because there isn’t any stink to escape.
I always order paper inside of plastic. That way, I use fewer plastic bags (which I then continue to reuse throughout the week) and still have paper, which I use to hold and carry out my recycling. Once we’ve amassed enough of the plastic bags, we head back down to Safeway to recycle them, too.
Plastic bags. Every day I used a new grocery bag for food trash like banana peels, yogurt tops, cereal bowls and spoons, styrofoam meat containers…pretty much anything that will stink or rot. Every morning on my way to the car I toss that small bag into the dumpster. That way my apartment smells cleaner all the time, and I take the ‘big’ trash out less often.
I found that I get way more plastic bags than I am able to use at home. I use maybe 3 a week, tops, for stuff around the house and I’m sure I get at least 7 from the store every week. They just pile up and…yes, I do throw a lot away.
Two weeks ago I purchased 99-cent canvas bags from my grocery store to use instead of their plastic bags. Of course, last week I promptly forgot to bring said bags to the store with me
Today I am going grocery shopping, though, and thanks to this thread I’ll remember to bring my canvas bags with me.
The city of Toronto is trucking its waste to Michigan, a situation that cannot continue. As a result, it’s pushing composting big time, with city-wide collection of organics in green bins, that go to a central composting facility. Apparently the system is a victim of its own success, though; volumes of organic waste are overwhelming the composting facilities that the city put in, and they are taking it to composting facilities outside the city.
I suspect the city is going to start pushing home and local composting, especially as more and more apartment buildings come onstream and start composting. It’d return nutrients to our soils locally as well, without the expense of an extra petro-fueled transportation loop.
Me, as a result of this thread, I think I’m going to try vermicomposting again, and this time keep going with it. Organics and plastic bags/packaging are the two largest components of waste remaing from me; the rest is containers, cardboard, and paper, and that all gets recycled.
