What do you think of banning the plastic bags used by grocery and other stores?

To me it would seem like an excellent opportunity for a bag manufacture to produce and sell a thinner Mil thickness trash bag. I for one don’t think these thicker bags are as much of an issues as when they were once full of dozens of discarded grocery bags. I have been shopping with canvas shopping bags now for over a year and wonder why I didn’t do this sooner as they are soooo much nicer and easier to use.

I’m all for it. Who doesn’t have their own canvas bags at this point?
There was a market in my area growing up that would charge you for bags. I would love markets to start doing this.

So have sales on garbage bags jumped because the plastic grocery bags used to be used as bin liners? If that’s the case, and the goal was to reduce the amount of plastic going into landfills, it sounds as if the ploy isn’t working very well.

I’m not sure how I feel about it. It would remind me to take my canvas bags, but I suppose I’ll need to buy about 20 of them since I do the bulk of my shopping only once or twice a month.

Would people who can’t afford canvas bags start using paper bags again?

They really are handy for using in smaller trash cans, especially because of the handles. If the idea is out there to make thinner can liners, why not just let people continue using the grocery bags? Isn’t the whole thing, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle? They can be reused to carry groceries again on the next visit.

The ones that aren’t used for trash bins can be recycled and it is so much simple – they have a bin for them at the front of every store. People just need to do it. Unfortunately, major encouragement is still required to get people to do almost any recycling.

Has anyone looked into the financial impact of banning the bags? Lost jobs for production, transport, etc.?

It’s foolish, for exactly the reason you note. Also, a lot of the thin plastic bags used by retailers are made from corn starch, and degrade pretty quickly (believe it or not) in sunlight and air. So, yeah, they’re a nuisance and an easy target when they are discarded and hang from trees, for example. But they don’t hang there long before they biodegrade, only few have the patience to wait for that to happen. They see “bag in a tree” today and “let’s pass a law” tomorrow.

I use paper bags inside those plastic bags as trash containers, and they work great. I would hate to have to buy trash bags again.

Banning plastic store bags would mean cutting down more trees for paper bags.

It’s a Catch 22 situation.

Aren’t there ecological plastic bags at stores? I mean we get a lot of them when we go to a shop but people are encouraged to buy paper bags or the ones made from other materials [those you can used multiple times]. Some stores here made policies and if you are a regular customer you can take till X number of these bags if you return them back in a good condition. This works pretty well since most don’t take the bags with them when go shopping but when they collect like 10 or so they return them back to the store. Works so well :P

@john65pennington Not true. If we were all to use cloth shopping bags, there wouldn’t be a need for either paper or plastic ones. The cloth shopping bags I have are much sturdier than either paper or plastic, and they can be tossed in the wash if need be.

I’m with @CWOTUS

I recycle my plastic shopping bags as trash liners for my bathroom and small kitchen trash cans.
I also use them a lot to wrap up leftovers in the fridge. Saves on other plastic products like trash liners and saran wrap etc.

I also toss wet leftover foods and cat food in them and tie them up before tossing in the trash cans and use them for the cat litter box waste too.

@Coloma You and I seem to have a different definition of recycling. To me, recycling a plastic bag means having it turned into another product after its initial use. Using a plastic shopping bag for other uses, but still ultimately ends up in a landfill is just reusing it. It still ends up in the landfill.

@Pied_Pfeffer

Maybe I should have said ” re-purpose” instead of recycle.

I see this as one of those “pick your poison” issues. I don’t recycle plastic bags but I do other environmentally friendly things like not using chemicals and pesticides on my property, not cutting dead trees to be used as woodpecker and other cavity nesting bird zones, drive conservatively, so, It balances out IMO. :-)

I would rather see deposit with money back when they are returned. There are people in other countries who have an entire cottage industry reusing plastic bags, turning them into various household items.

Here is a list of 99 ways to reuse plastic bags

Banning them is ridiculous, because it is not only stores that use them. I have seen furniture and pallets of other products completely wrapped in plastic wrap, which is much worse than plastic carry bags.

@YARNLADY

Good list there! :-)

I just thought of #100

Great use as a suffocating device for those pesky annoying people we all have to cope with.
Double bag em’ haha

Thank you all for your responses and lurve to you all.

It is a strange problem. If we wrap organic scraps in plastic bags, be they free or purchased, they take forever to dissipate but the organic stuff inside would be gone in a matter of days if not wrapped in the plastic. But I have to admit, they are convenient. I know there is a type that breaks up into tiny little dots, but it is still little dots of plastic, just not as visible but equally as polluting. If you live in a house with a yard, we should all have a compost heap, then there would be a lot less organic waste going into landfills and we wouldn’t need plastic bags. Or perhaps the answer is to make them a lot stronger and put a big deposit on them. I guess we all have to be more creative about waste and what to do with it!