Arthur Rubin wrote:Back to the 5p (usually 10 cents in the US) plastic bags. Many cities in California, and soon the whole state, will have a ban on "disposable" plastic (carrier) bags. However, ....
Paper bags, and to some extent cloth bags, are useless in carrying things that potentially leak brightly colored (coloured) liquids. (I'm going to speak American in the rest of the post, without trying to add running translation.) In our case, when we have a plastic bag which isn't sticky or wet, we use them to line (plastic) wastepaper baskets. Seems a reasonable recycling method. I suspect that, when we run out of plastic bags, we're going to have to occasionally dispose of the entire wastepaper baskets when a sufficiently obnoxious substance is disposed of.
I used to work in a supermarket in my high school days, I was a bagboy, one who bagged and took out groceries to the customer's car. I had several shoppers ask me to only use plastic, and only put three items or less in each bag, as they used them for trash bags at home, and wanted as many as possible. That always bothered me. As for using the bags for trash after shopping, there are such things as biodegradable and eco friendly "plastic" garbage bags that are better for the environment, as they are biodegradable, and much cheaper than disposing of the whole wastepaper basket.