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RE: [GreenYes] personal anecdote on the bag issue
Hi Jeff,
I do the same thing with my plastic garbage bags -- double them up and use
them for household garbage instead of buying plastic trash bags.  The small
size works for the 2 of us most of the time, and I do have a backup box of
bigger ones for when we have a household cleanout, or a mess of seafood,
etc.  
In our area (Northern Virginia) the largest grocery store chains do backhaul
the plastic bags collected out front to their warehouse, bale them, and sell
them to Trex in Winchester for plastic lumber production.  Trex also has
facilities in the west, and I think the Midwest.  
PS -- by daily pick-up, do you really mean daily, or just a dumpster
available in the lot?  Our dumpsters are picked up twice a week in the condo
complex.  But we still only take the trash out when it's full.

Terri 
Fairfax, VA

-----Original Message-----
From: Elder.Jeff [mailto:Jeff.Elder@msmail.unitedway.org] 
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 6:57 PM
To: 'greenyes@grrn.org'
Subject: [GreenYes] personal anecdote on the bag issue

Just a personal anecdote regarding the grocery bag issue.   I've gone
through various stages of outrage at the plastic bag mania we have in our
economy.  I've used reusable bags before, but did often forget (for shame!).
I have to admit I've even gotten lazy once or twice once I've found myself
in the store and the bags in the car and not gone out and gotten them
(double for shame!).  I haven't ever used bags twice or more as was
recommended, but I feel somewhat better now with my current system, which is
using the little plastic bags from grocery stores for my garbage.  Since I
don't have a family, the trash load is fairly small, so the little bags
allow me to discard the trash more often without it smelling up my kitchen.
I have a daily pickup but could imagine larger household (or those without
daily pickups) just toting the smaller bags out to the larger trash can.
The beauty of this system (you can tell I'm quite smug about this ;)  )  is
that I don't buy the expensive and very thick plastic garbage bags at the
store, which, I imagine, contains a heckuva lot more plastic than the
paper-thin ones you get in the grocery store.  The only problem I can see is
that you do sometimes get more bags than you need for trash - but I've
rarely had an oversupply.   Curious, does anyone know what actually happens
to the plastic bag collections that grocery stores have? I sometimes do that
when I have too many.  Do those actually get recycled? ( I have memories of
Gruene Punkt in Germany where the symbol rarely meant that something was
being recycled, or so I was told).  

Jeff Elder
Alex, Va.

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