I believe the standard shopping bag is .5 mil or thinner. If you’re buying bags for your dog poop then you’re still tossing it in the dump. Are you paying the city for using the bags?
The “long term” shopping bags they sell around my neck of the woods don’t last very long. The handles come off or the side stitching fails. My grocery store takes the single use bags for recycle. They don’t take the woven ones and there is no marking on them to tell if they qualify for recycling by the city.
You are getting some seriously bad bags, then. I regularly carry full bags of groceries a mile or so, and haven’t had these kinds of problems.
The bags i now use are maybe an eighth the size and clearly less thick. And no, I don’t pay the city for their use. It’s part of my normal garbage pickup. I know, so hypocritical that one bag is free yet another type of bag is so discriminated against. Jesse Jackson where are you??
As others have said, the capacity of some of the reusable bags is quite large, certainly much bigger than a typical plastic bag. And I suppose quality can vary, but I don’t have problems with durability. My favorite type is a flat-bottomed insulated bag with a zipper top that is particularly great for refrigerated items in the summer. I’ve had a few of them for over five years and they’re still just fine.
I’m not a fanatic about these things and if I come home with a few plastic bags as well I can live with it – I’ll use them for garbage, dog poop, etc. What I object to is coming home with so many plastic bags that they accumulate and have to be disposed of. What one really wants to avoid is stuffing a plastic bag with dozens of other plastic bags and throwing it all in the trash.
If you end up with too many, why not just stuff them with a dozen other plastic bags and throw them in the recycle bin?
In many jurisdictions that’s not an option; plastic bags (and clamshells, and some other types of plastic) are often a PITA to recycle, and whether or not curbside recycling will accept them is a matter of local and international market forces as well as local sort/recycle capability. Hell, even here in Portlandia we still can’t put plastic bags curbside (rather, we can if we want to see them in the landfill) and have only been able to take them to a local recycling center for a scant year.
I thought it was obvious. The price of those bags along with everything else is already figured up into the markup cost percentages.
Does OP think we should pay for shipping costs to the store? Sure so long as they bring down the markup cost, but that’s problem. They don’t. All your doing is increasing their profit margins for already good profit margins. Many grocers are well into the multiples of millions of dollars per year and the CEO certainly will take is fair share cut of any extra’s as well. Perhaps we should pay for the boxes all those food items often come to the store in before being taken out and put onto the shelf while we are at it.
But we’ve been paying for our own bags at certain stores like Aldi’s but they are much cheaper food costs to boot.
Btw I don’t think this is correct. Grocery stores put some of that money towards environmental causes but it is far from 100%.
Wanted to add: It obviously varies by jurisdiction but Ontario doesn’t legislate what they have to do with the money collected. In fact, AFAIK, the current charge for bags is completely voluntary. The big chains started doing it across the province when Toronto passed a municipal bylaw and then kept doing after the bylaw died. That’s simply their money and we have no idea how much goes to environmental causes.
Some things may seem obvious, but they aren’t. This is an EXTRA fee added on to the cost, not something already factored in.
So, at least 60% of fee is actually new a tax. This would be on top of the cost the retailer pays for the bags.
So says an industry funded “study” that stands to lose millions if their bags are replaced. Seriously, where did they do these tests? At a dirty Asian market where they kill and butcher the animals right there and wrap them in newspaper?
As already noted, plastic bags and plastic films are typically among the exclusions for recycling. That is the case in my area. Excluded materials are either because they don’t work with automatic sorting machines and/or the plastic types aren’t suitable for the available recycling markets.
Maybe they tested bags that were used for transporting diarrheic live chickens … 
Every single grocery store that I’ve ever been in, from mega regional chains to small mom and pop’s have a recycling bin near the front door.
The bags are even printed with “please recycle this bag at you nearest store.”
I have never seen that in my life. And I’m looking at a shopping bag right now and all it has on it (other than branding) is the recycling triangle with a 4.
Double post.
Mine have a 2.
Anyway, sorry that wherever you live hasn’t caught up.
Charging for bags makes people question whether they really need them and thus reduces the total introduced to the area. Charging for garbage can have the oposite effect environmenta lists are looking for as if it becomes costly to get rid of garbage people are more likely to resort to illegal means.
Towns that include trash pick up as city services have less instances of illegal dumping than those that don’t.
My store had one, before plastic bags were banned. But hardly anyone ever used them. Why would they when there was no incentive to do so? And the people who cared enough to go to the effort to recycle plastic bags probably are happy to use reusable bags.
Some other stuff while I’m here. As I said, I buy bags that are given out for our conference, and you can be sure we buy cheap ones. I use them also. None of the bags (which are about the size of paper bags) have ever worn out for me. The only reusable bag which has was a really big one which sometimes got overloaded.
If chicken juice leaks into a bag, there could be a sanitation problem. (Boxes, not so much.) Simple enough to toss the bag in with your next load of wash.
Oh don’t feel sorry for me. Just happy that now you know the rest of North America isn’t exactly like Seattle.
Where in North America do you live? I’m guessing Canada. Which is a lot more like Seattle than Texas or Mexico City.