Plastic Bag Recycling: Costs, Disposal & Pollution

[turbo]

One concern of mine is that the guy at our town's waste transfer station/recycle facility can't tell me where that plastic is going. With all the containers coming to the US from China, I have a sneaking suspicion the the recycling outfits are simply pressing and baling these "recycled" plastics, loading them into containers and shipping them to China. Those containers have to be returned to China anyway, so why not return them full of our waste plastic and other materials that are supposed to be being recycled? Our town has to pay a recycling outfit to haul away the plastic, and I expect the recycling business is not sorting and recycling the material if they can sell it to a business in another country where re-using plastics or even burning them for fuel can be done with few environmental regulations.

 

[Logger]

Here in Ireland in 2002 they put a tax on plastic bags used in Ireland.It costs about 35US cents per bag.Since the introduction the amount of litter has reduced quite a lot.If you but fruit,bread,meats etc they give you smaller plastics bags free,but for packing your groceries you have to pay the 35cents.Everybody brings their own bags these days.They are large re-usable bags normally.I can only say that it has been a great introduction and every country should adopt this tax.

 

[mgb_phys]

I can only say that it has been a great introduction and every country should adopt this tax.

Do you now buy plastic bin liners?

Reduce -> Reuse -> Recycle - I use as few plastic bags as possible, but the ones I do take I reuse as bin liners, it's better than buying recycled trash bags.

 

[Moonbear]

When I was a kid, and paper bags were all we had, we used the paper bags as trash bin liners. I think that was better than using the plastic bags, because at least the paper bags are biodegradable when they head to the landfill. We'd only use the large plastic trash can liners as an actual liner...basically, it was back up if a paper bag broke or leaked, but that was rare because most "leaky" things went to the compost heap. Since the plastic bags from the grocery store always arrive home with holes in the bottom, they're pretty useless for anything other than being put IN the trash. I can't even use them to scoop kitty litter. I reuse the sturdier plastic bags from department stores though. But, even so, I end up with way more plastic bags than I can ever reuse, so a lot end up just heading to the trash with no secondary use.

Paper bags had many secondary uses. Aside from being used for trash bags, they could be used instead of paper towels for draining fried foods. They made good book covers when I was in school (instead of buying covers). As turbo pointed out, they were great for holding fresh produce and storing it without spoiling. More often than not, we'd run out of paper bags before we ran out of uses for them, unlike plastic bags that just accumulate with very little function beyond their original purpose.

Though, now I'm wondering if I could take a bunch of the torn ones and weave them together into a sturdier reusable bag?

 

[mgb_phys]

Though, now I'm wondering if I could take a bunch of the torn ones and weave them together into a sturdier reusable bag?

Or with a stapler or sticky tape your own line of recyclable, ready for the cat-walk, evening wear.

 

[Moonbear]

Or with a stapler or sticky tape your own line of recyclable, rwady for the cat walk, evening wear.

Maybe I'll try it on the cat first.

 

[Redbelly98]

This state unfortunately is not very fiscally responsable. If the tax goes through they will attempt to calculate how much they expect to make in revenue from the tax. They will then allocate those funds before they even acquire them. Citizens will eventually modify their behavior to avoid the tax and the budget will suffer a short fall. It's happened several times now, especially with taxes supposedly designed to modify citizen behavior, and the state is perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy even though it has the wealthiest economy in the country. California is the poster child for slippery slope taxation. Considering that the actual purpose of the tax is to help balance the budget, and not to help the environment, it will only create a domino chain of more problems some of which Moonie has already pointed out.

Valid point. It didn't occur to me that the bag money would be handled incompetently by the organization it goes to, to the extent that the extra income actually causes them to lose money! If that's the case, then forget about this method of taxation.

Perhaps a better solution (maybe I read it elsewhere on this thread) is for stores to offer a discount to those who use reusable bags. But that has to be a voluntary action on the part of the store's management.

 

[turbo]

As Moonie suggested, when I was a kid, my mother used to use Kraft grocery bags to drain fats from fried foods like donuts, French fries, fried clams, etc. After that, they made KILLER fire-starters in the wood stove.