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...but plastic bags take much longer to degrade, tearing into smaller and smaller pieces, and often being consumed by and poisoning wildlife. Better to use biodegradable plastic bags, or no bag at all, for your trash, and reusable bags at the supermarket.
Realizing that this is a resurrected thread from 2008, I'll bite, because this is an issue near and dear to my heart. One doesn't typically need a trash bag if landfill waste is kept to a bare minimum and placed clean & dry into the receptacle. Any food waste can go into an outdoor compost pile, but the best option is just to eat what you purchase and prepare, so there's little left to discard.
See my album for a photo that shows how our family shops with reusables to reduce our household waste stream.
Last edited by randomparent; 05-08-2014 at 08:51 PM..
I am sure it is possible but I think the best solution is to stop our dependence on plastic or paper bags. A lot of places in the UK now offer free canvas bags which are re-usable and permanent and easy to use.
Irish supermarkets'stores etc... started to charge for plastic bags and virtually nobody in Eire now uses plastic bags. Britain is thinking of doing the same and I think it's an excellent idea.
We need to reduce packaging and throw-away bags are part of that culture. A lot of places here for example now use corn starch packaging for food products which looks just like plastic and is completely bio-degradable.
Coming up with new bio-degradable products is great but even better would be for us to start behaving more responsibly and less wastefully.
prevention is better than cure, i like your idea of less dependency on plastic bags and therefore less waste plastic recycle is required, if we use less bags.
I love this thread! There are always more ways to help the environment. Does anyone remember the old Blondie and Dagwood comics where Blondie put Dagwood's lunch on the kitchen counter for him to take - wrapped up in newspaper and tied as a nice package, alongside an identical newspaper-wrapped package which was actually the kitchen garbage, and he took the garbage to work instead of his lunch.
Anyhoo, how about wrapping in newspaper? Does no one take the paper anymore? Probably not. I don't either, and this wouldn't solve my main problem anyway, because my main problem with the garbage is that it starts to stink after awhile and before pickup, and normally plastic bags solved that problem. We compost everything, but one can't put fish skins (notoriously stinky), bones, fat, etc., in the compost so there will always be something to go into the regular garbage that can rot and cause odors. We don't leave our cans outside because of raccoons, so they sit in the garage.
We also have a small place in the UK where they provide biodegradeable bags for food waste. This is good, but still, they only pick this up once a week. So I place the small filled food waste bags into the freezer until pickup time, when I haul them out and dump into the pickup bin. Lately I have started doing this in the U.S., too (putting the uncompostable stinky stuff in the freezer until pickup) but again in the U.S. it is in a plastic bag. And all my other stuff is in one, too.
Plastic vs Paper? You think paper is better? Not so fast...
When I was young, we only used paper bags for our groceries. This was at a time when the logging industry was simple and they didn't have huge machines to hack down whole forests. Greed created clear cutting instead of selective logging and to keep up with the demand for paper and wood products. Clear cutting is not only an eyesore. Animals depend on those forests to live and the earth needs forests/green areas for oxygen.
Then they came up with plastic bags and paper went by the wayside. I used to use plastic until I became educated about their effects on the environment. I use my recycle bags for groceries and keep my use of plastic bags to a minimum.
So: paper degrades but whole forests are lost, and take years to regrow. Plastic is worse.. more use of oil, they don't degrade and our landfills are overflowing with it.
What's the solution? I believe that biodegradable bags are the only way to go as long as they are made from recycled products that are already available and the chemicals needed to manufacture them aren't harmful to the environment. They need to be strong enough to handle moisture, or the average consumer won't use them if plastic is still available.
Plastic vs Paper? You think paper is better? Not so fast...
When I was young, we only used paper bags for our groceries. This was at a time when the logging industry was simple and they didn't have huge machines to hack down whole forests. Greed created clear cutting instead of selective logging and to keep up with the demand for paper and wood products. Clear cutting is not only an eyesore. Animals depend on those forests to live and the earth needs forests/green areas for oxygen.
Then they came up with plastic bags and paper went by the wayside. I used to use plastic until I became educated about their effects on the environment. I use my recycle bags for groceries and keep my use of plastic bags to a minimum.
So: paper degrades but whole forests are lost, and take years to regrow. Plastic is worse.. more use of oil, they don't degrade and our landfills are overflowing with it.
What's the solution? I believe that biodegradable bags are the only way to go as long as they are made from recycled products that are already available and the chemicals needed to manufacture them aren't harmful to the environment. They need to be strong enough to handle moisture, or the average consumer won't use them if plastic is still available.
It is a false dichotomy, the goal is to have most people move to reusable bags not paper bags.
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