Tips to reduce the use of plastic bags

Proper recycling requires trips to recycling locations around your town. But you may have trouble finding a center – some may be long miles away – or it may simply not be possible to make it to center with your busy, busy workdays. In that case the article provides you with several ways you can use plastic bags around the house, which are great ideas. However, with a little thought plastic bags can fill in an almost unlimited number of roles around the house.

For example, if you travel a lot, you may want to bring along a few plastic bags to use for holding laundry so they don't get mixed up with the clean clothes in your bags. Problem instantly solved! If you have small trashcans around your house, you can also use them as liners. There are also many less…conventional uses. A spare plastic bag can get a lot of use as a mini-parachute for a toy that your children may want to float – all you need are a few pieces of string. If you are into surfing, a plastic bag over the foot makes it very easy to slide into wetsuit pant legs, considering the chore it often becomes otherwise. If you want to always carry a plastic bag around with you, there are even more ways you make use of them. Some people who bike take a plastic bag and cover their bike seat when it is raining and they have to chain up outside. When they get back on their bike, they can slip off the plastic and use a dry, and preserved, bike seat.

Gardening also makes a great hobby to combine with your used plastic bags. When you garden, you can use larger versions for your knees to avoid dirt and grass stain. The bags are also excellent for holding weeds, nipped buds, or fertilizer that you're spreading around from a larger bag. If you have an outdoor painting project to do and don't want to get a clean brush dirty, you can also use spare bags to wrap around the brush and protect it. Some people even cut the larger plastic bags and use them as book covers – not for any ordinary books, but for cookbooks and textbooks and others that may be subject to damage otherwise.

When in doubt, you can also use plastic bags to create works of art! A little application of heat and you can create plastic string that you can use for a number of different designs. If you have the proper protective gear, you can also choose to make yarn, beads, and strips with potential for many different craft projects…or in some cases, just for a bit of useful twine if you need to tie something that the plastic can hold. The more elaborate projects allow you to make hats and soda can holders out of plastic bags. With enough strips, you can form easily disposable plastic mats or placemats.

The way it was written, I am not sure what the author means exactly by talking about when he or she says that when you recycle something not all of it is recycled and there is still some waste.  Does this mean that there are a few bags that do not make it through the process that are on the recycling plant floor?  Does it mean that when the bags are processed that there is some part that just does not make it through?  I do not get it.  I think this argument could have been made better by discussing how much effort is put into recycling plastic and how many resources it takes to do so, including water, chemicals, and electricity usage.

The advice at the bottom was solid, but not spectacular.  I thought that the list could have been longer and/or more elaborated upon.  If this was the key of the article, then I would have to go ahead and say the article fell flat.  There are many more uses for plastic bags than this, too.  The only one I thought I could really use was keeping some in the car in case of emergency.  Other advice off the top of my head:  Use plastic bags to carry home your wet bathing suit and towel from the gym or pool; use them in the bulk aisle at grocery stores to save on packaging; put them around your shoes when walking indoors in areas where babies and small children play, or just to keep the carpets nice when walking across a room or your shoes nice when walking through the rain.   See how easy that was for me?  And that is just from uses that I have for plastic bags personally.  I did not expect for everything in the list to be new and applicable to me, but I was hoping to see a few gems and some factual information, but did not.  Although the intention may have been good and the concept was interesting, the arguments fell a bit short and the main points did as well.  A reasonable effort for the article’s short length, however.

This article comes at a good time, since the plastic bag controversy is reaching new heights right now.  On one hand, people have the opinion that paper bags were far worse for the environment because they are made out of trees.  Yet on the other hand, as this article discusses, plastic bags are made out of petroleum, a non-renewable resource that has many negative environmental impacts.  Thus I began reading the article with some hope of both hearing some new facts as well as learning some new information.  Unfortunately, while the article could have taken those routes, it ended up taking no particular route and falling flat on its face.

The “Plastic Bags Hurt Wildlife” argument is a good one, and definitely has not received very much attention recently.  I think this is because of the initial attention that it got in the 1990‘s environmentalist wave, when plastic recycling was making giant leaps into mainstream culture.  The sentence about the topic in this article was pretty weak, however, and it could have had more impact on the reader to create that sense of urgency about the situation.  The author likely assumes that you have heard this all before (not an untrue assumption, in my case anyway) and are not interested.  Then why mention it at all though?  Chances are, you found yourself reading this article because you were interested.  I know I have heard about this issue a lot, but what I know may be dated information, I have not actually heard anything about this topic for quite some time now.  So I would not have been annoyed with a little more than just one sentence about the fact that plastic bags can hurt wildlife, and I think more than one sentence is necessary to do it justice.  Perhaps some statistics on how many animals die or are injured each year would make a stronger case, or whether there are ways to reduce that impact by recycling or re-using plastic bags.

What also would have made a stronger argument for the re-use of plastic is that plastic, while it can be recycled, is still thrown in the trash more often than not.  It could have been mentioned that there are many types of plastic in common use that are absolutely not recyclable, and that there are alternatives to using this plastic for the most part.  Tying this example into the wildlife issue, millions of butane lighters are made of plastic each year and are not recyclable, and in fact there are thousands of butane lighters each year that wind up floating on the ocean surface and are eaten by sea birds who mistake them for food.

Yes, in my area, grocery stores charge like 5 cents for plastic bags, or they want you to use your own cloth/mesh plastic-like bags.  They sell reusable bags, but I find that the grocery store reusable bags are usually pretty small. 

The department stores have larger reusable bags that you can buy for $1.00 and you can find less stylish versions of these bags at the $1 store.  I find that these large reusable bags are better for groceries.  Because they are made of a kind of plastic, you can usually clean them out with soap and water, but eventually you will have to throw them away if you use them to transport food on a regular basis.  I do not know if these bags are typically recyclable in most states, but if they are, they would be even more desirable for these purposes.

I think that most people still find themselves just getting the plastic bags from the grocery store, but I think that most people reuse them for some purpose though. 

I use them for trash bags all the time, and I use them to hold curlers, do deep conditioner treatments on my hair, and other things.  They do not look that nice, but at least I know that I will use just about every plastic bag that comes through my house at least 2 times, sometimes 3 times.  I use them to pick up after my pet when I am in a public place all the time, and they are great when you are traveling, when you want to keep your shoes separate from the rest of your clothes in your suitcase. 

I use them to pack toiletries, under garments and anything else that I want to keep separate in my suitcase. 

I wish grocery store plastic bags looked nicer though sometimes.  I would love to find a grocery store bag recycling project or reusing project that made the things look good.  When it comes to Ziploc bags, they look so nice.  When I use them to organize small toiletries in my suitcase, they look so organized and neat. 

I remember when I was young, for a brief spell some people in my family would clean them out, and I have tried to do this several times, but I like things to be neat and clean, and I always worry that I am not getting the inside of the bag as clean as possible, so unfortunately, I end up throwing those away after one use. 

However, now that I think about it, I will look around online for solutions that will help me feel comfortable reusing these bags as well.  I usually feel bad when I throw them away, but I just cannot stomach the idea of potato chip residue, all over my small toiletries or underclothes because I did not clean a Ziploc bag out well enough.

I especially love the tip about not asking for plastic bags at the grocery stores. In Europe where I grew up, you actually have to pay to receive a grocery bag. I think that's a great system and I hope it's eventually instituted here. The "double bagging" for a loaf of bread is ridiculous. Are Americans too fat and lazy to simply carry their own grocery items? Then again, the average American buys so much darn food, you need a Hummer to fit it all.

Another thing you can use plastic bags for is as saran wrap. I know it sounds weird, but we use them constantly to cover food containers and they work great. It also doesn't hurt to keep a couple in your car in case you need an on the road trash bag or something to store something in.

I think that was a great idea. Instead of a plastic bag we use a paper bag or Tupperware to store our food. Not only does the food last longer, it doesn't smell as bad or get too humid.

- Curwen's Body & Paint

I'm all for re-using plastic bags. In fact, what our "recycling-friendly" culture doesn't realize, is that half the stuff you dump in the recycling bin (usually anything above #1 or #2) will not be recycled and will eventually end up in a land fill.

How to counteract this? Simple - find a way to use whatever it is you're tossing. Tennis balls, for example, can be used to support the hand strollers old ladies use to get around. I ran into one at a sporting goods store that was going to buy a brand new can of balls! When I found out what she was using them for, I told her not to buy the can - I would give her a whole bag of old balls in my car. And the kicker? She goes through 4 balls every two weeks! That's almost as much as a tennis player, and at $2-3 bucks a can, she's spending up to $12/ month just to get around on her stroller.

That's just an example - get creative, have fun, and help us save the planet Earth's Friends!!

Switch to a smaller garbage pail, about half the height of a regular one. The typical plastic store bags will fit as a liner. It might be a hassle to take out the trash more frequently, but it's supposed to be healthier for the indoor air to take it out daily anyway.