Wot is this issue with carrier bags& Supermarkets I thought they were biodegradable now& I re-use mine anyway?

Question

if not for other shopping, then I use them to bag smelly waste like potato peelings. Not everybody can make a compost heep, so what am I supposed to do with stinky rubbish, if there aren't going to be any plastic bags anymore?
Will I be able to buy plastic sandwich bags, bin liners and black bin bags still?

Answer 1

Many people don't clean out the plastic bags before placing them for recycling. Recycling plants have a difficult time recycling the plastic bags because any contaminates left in the bags will contaminate the entire batch that they try to recycle, thus making it so they have to toss it as garbage. Time and money is wasted as a result, so recycling plants have taken to not accepting them as recycling material. Therefore, grocers are now phasing them out.

Answer 2

Keeping the world environmentally clean so that our grandchildren can be brought up in a healthy world is what our concern is. The thing about biodegradeable bags has begun in the big cities (and in states with a big and concentrated population) where there is a lot of trash and stuff that goes to the landfills that takes maybe 100 years or more to disintegrate, but some things they have found do not disintegrate, so they are asking that we recycle those things into items like roads, clothing, roofing and flooring, etc.

some things can be ground in your sink if you have that before going down the drain. When I first started renting here they required that we put used pet sand in double plastic bags, so I understand your concern. You can put your things into brown bags but they have ink on them and are just as bad in the dumps but they dissolve quicker. for sandwich bags you can buy reusable containers, we used to do without bin liners by rinsing them out and washing with lysol or bleach, I don't know what a black bin bag is used for. But if you're talking about a bag to put leaves in, well then just put that into the trash can. This is not a big a deal as it sounds, they just want us to go back to the 1950's way of doing things. We survived.

Answer 3

I haven't heard anything about the Supermarkets in my area going away from plastic bags. If you live out around California that may be true. Plastic bags are the cheapest option for most Supermarkets, that's why they went away from paper bags. Providing government legislation doesn't prevent your supermarket from using plastic bags, if the Supermarket starts losing busines I'm sure they'll start going back to them.

Answer 4

While far from perfect there are biodegradeable plastic bags made from corn/soy cellulose. They look and feel very much like plastic but eventually will break down in a landfill. I use them to contain my kitchen scraps before sending them out to my compost heap.

Answer 5

when the bagger asks me...paper or plastic? i simply say well if you dont mind carrying them up my stairs and picking up all the groceries if it tears from moisture from the ice cream and meats i have here then by all means gimme paper if you are as lazy as i am gimme plastic......they always give me plastic :) if its not the plastic its the cigar smoke if not that then its hair spray if not that then its car exhaust come on now let us live!!! BTW if they do stop all that good stuff dont they realise they will have a much bigger mess to clean up? because people will dump their garbage in other places like a sewer ive seen it done

Answer 6

I use my plastic grocery sacks to put dirty diapers in before I throuw them away.

Answer 7

I reuse my bags too, have no idea what the big deal is.