thoughts on the plastic bag

The push lately has been on recycling plastic bags (from groceries, retailers, etcetera) and to use totes whenever shopping to reduce the waste of plastic bags. But truth be told, some people can't escape the plastic plague -- so they take their old bags to be recycled and get new bags at every store. Therefore the question has been lurking -- is it better to recycle the old bags or to actually reuse them? Comment on this, if you would, but it makes sense to me to reuse old bags until they're no longer usable (ripped, torn, shredded), thus conserving the energy and resources needed to recycle the old and turn them into new. The fewer bags we're sending through factories, recycled or new, the better off we'll be in the long run.

Check out this link from the Grassroots Recycling Network in 2005. They seem to support my opinion on reuse.

Can't figure out how to stop getting bags you don't want or need? Simply make the request. Though store employees have been trained to bag every little item, they're happy enough to fulfill a request for no bag, even if they don't understand it (I have gotten a few funny looks when I've asked for no bag). I was taken by happy surprise this weekend when a checkout person actually asked if I needed a bag for what I was purchasing -- and I didn't.

Yes, yes, bags are only a part of the problem, but everything small thing we can do helps -- figure it this way: if you get 8 bags from the grocery each week on average, and replace those bags with 2-3 totes instead, you're saving 416 bags a year -- that's almost 20 pounds of bags. Multiply that by friends, family, coworkers... you get the idea.