PAPER OR . . . PAPER

My wife religiously takes her stash of these cloth-like bags that supermarkets were all hockin us with a year or so ago. She loads them in the ruck and goes off to do shopping. When she gets there she leaves the bags in the truck (she forgets to take em ad says "Screw it Im ot going back out to the damn parking lot" when she checks out.
Plastic bags around here have been converted to te degradeable soy oil plastic so its really biodegradable. (Its chemical half life is less than a month). The only drawback is that these bags MUST be recycled soon, since keeping them around and using them for . like, car trash bags will only demo how degradable they are. They oxidize into leedle chunks. A kid did a science fair project on bioplastic bags and the newspapers did a whole feature on the process so many of us are now clued into an entirely new branch of container
"Eco-feel -good- about- yourself-plastic bags"

Ive used mine as garden mulch , and we buried a dead chicken in one.

How did the chicken take it?

People around here are pretty good about taking bags to the store. Several years ago, city council imposed a fee of a nickel on every plastic bag, but decided not to burden themselves, so, rather than collect the fee from the merchants, they just left it to them. Well, they were ignoring human nature--the merchants, to show good will, didn't charge the five cents. This measure, i think, is intended to deal with the plastic bag problem once and for all, and the mayor be damned.

I'd not heard of the bio-bags, but i've known they can make plastic ffrom corn syrup since i was a kid in high school--so i long wondered why it wasn't being done. Inertia, i suppose. Glad to hear it.

I always demand paper bags, but I am in a tiny minority here. Often they will say that they have run out. What I hate about plastic bags, beyond the environmental arguments, is they are small and flimsy. After driving my groceries home, I have to rebag lots. Meanwhile groceries have been rolling around in my pick up. They use one bag per item, such as potato chips and bread, but stuff other bags full of cans of vegetables.

Our curbside recycling program doesn't accept plastic bags anymore, but does take paper bags, so we switched.

We haven't had plastic bags for about a year now. You hardly ever see them floating down the street anymore, which is nice.

The store I usually shop in gave away cloth bags to their card carrying customers when the policy went into effect and they credit you a nickle for each bag you use, each time you shop.

The only downside has been that I now have to buy little plastic bags for dog poop scooping duty.

We've done that for quite a while. I also keep the bags from loaves of bread, and particularly appreciate the bags from "English" muffins. It's interesting, too, because when i was a boy, bread didn't come in plastic bags--it was wrapped in waxed paper.

Yeah, I use BioBags for garbage:



Can't throw away any hot fluids, but that doesn't come up much anyway. Generally very happy with them, have been using them for a few years.

Hey boomer, when I was looking for that I found this:

I have about 15 or so cloth bags that I use regularly. Once in a while we'll be shopping together and there are no bags in my husband's car so I'll have to use the plastic ones, but I use them to line all my household garbage pails, so they do double duty. I would prefer if they were the biodegradable type but Calgary is so backwards - we just got recycling bins here!

No plastic bag use here for a long time. We also have a whole collection of the cloth bags, but as we don't drive a car and walk to the grocery store, they work out really well. We get paper ones from the store occasionally as well and use them as trash bags.

Cycloptichorn

I use re-susable bags for shopping too, but I like the plastic bags. The are never used only once. I use them to poop scoop and for the smaller garbage cans around the house. Seems stupid to buy bags when I can get them for free - depending on the store. Some charge the 5 cent fee, which is definitely not a city hall thing here. It's just another cash grab by the stores. There's no way in hell these bags cost that much to make and distribute.
Paper makes even less sense to me, as the cost both environmentally and production wise, just doesn't seem worth it. If it was hemp, it would be another story.

On the local CBC program, "Ontario Today," they're doing a call-in show on this topic. One gentleman, who identified himself as Neil, said that he had just returned from hiking on the tundra in Nunavit. He said there are plastic shopping bags blowing all over the landscape there.

Someone should've called to let him know about the crying... ahem... native American commercial from the '80s. We're ON it.

I detest plastic bags to the core! I prefer paper bags and demand these also.