Say No to Plastic

Or at least use boxes. They're much more recyclable than plastic bags.

from http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/12/21/5950/

“If you’re comparing a paper bag made from virgin timber with a plastic bag made with natural gas, the paper bag causes more global warming pollution, more biodiversity impacts and more water impacts,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with NRDC who has worked on life cycle analyses for two decades. “If the paper bag is not recycled, it will generate greater carbon emissions during incineration than plastic would, or greater methane emissions if it is landfilled.”

One thing is clear in every study that has been done: Reusable bags beat both paper and plastic on virtually all environmental criteria.

"A 2002 Australian study concluded that someone using plastic grocery bags for a year would go through 520 bags and generate 6.08 kilograms of greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming. Someone using paper bags would also go through 520 bags to generate 11.8 kilograms of greenhouse gases.

But a year’s worth of reusable polypropylene bags - estimated at four bags, used twice a week - would generate less than 2 kilograms of greenhouse gases."

So don't use paper bags, use reusable cloth bags, or reusable plastic bags.

I find that I still end up with plastic bags anyway, when DH forgets the cloth bags, or when getting fruit, veges, etc from friends and family - and because we only use one of these shopping bags each week for household rubbish, we don't run out!

Or... you could just not use a bin liner :) Just rinse out the bin when you empty it - or if you are recycling and composting like you should be ;) the bin won't get dirty anyway :D

We no longer have enough plastic bags coming into our house to line our rubbish bins with. Most of the bins are fine without; our kitchen bin needs an occasional clean even though we put our food waste in a different bin for composting.

Our local Council requires plastic for recycling to be be secured in supermarket bags in the recycling bin; when people put loose plastic in their recycling bins, it blows all over the neighbourhood. Maybe, for those of us still producing some plastic rubbish for recycling, a good bag to secure it in is a cornstarch bag, such as those sold by:
www.friendlypak.co.nz/

Lisia
My blog:
http://lilsview.blogspot.com/

I don't use a bin liner at all. I compost all of my food scraps so that most of the rubbish that goes into the bin is just plastic packaging that can't be recycled.

Even when you rid your life of plastic shopping bags you'll still have little plastic bag like things that you can put icky bits of rubbish in.

Alternatively you can keep a small bucket for all your wet rubbish and just wrap it in newspaper before you put it in your wheelie bin or big rubbish bag.

Yes you will have to rinse your bin out when you empty it but it doesn't take very long.

Just don't use bin liners. It probably all goes into one big rubbish bag or wheelie bin anyway. It just means you'll need to wash your bin once a week to stop it smelling.

We also use plastic shopping bags as bin liners. Try using reuseable shopping bags for most of your groceries and get just one or two each week to use in the bin :)

When I was at school camp, we were very conscious of our waste because we had to pay for it. we went into town to buy groceries once a week and never used plastic bags. Paper bags for the fruit and vegetables though really you could bring ice cream containers and use them. We packed all our stuff into boxes which we reused until they broke and we recycled them. We didn't have any bin liners, we just washed the bin out when we emptied it. Most of the stuff that ends up in it is plastic packaging. However at home here, we don't feed our food scraps to the pigs we have a worm farm and worms can't deal with citrus, onions or any meat so that's a bit gross but not that bad really. Just think- you were happy to eat it two days ago!

Peace
Love
White
Light

The average plastic bag is less than 5g, and requires about as much oil as 5ml of petrol (both are refined etc.) 5ml of petrol will take the average new car 100m - enough to circle one aisle of the supermarket carpark, or less if you have the air-con on.

The benefit of plastic bags (and all sorts of nasty packaging) is that they prevent damage to fragile produce. Generally speaking the energy consumed in the production of the bags is orders of magnitude less than the products inside them. So you only need to prevent one jar of jam from being dropped and you've made several months' bags worthwhile.

Supermarkets and their suppliers have massive incentives for reducing the cost of delivering their goods to the shelf, and unnecessary energy or waste packaging hurts them more than it hurts us. If they could save a dollar by using less packaging they would.

By far the most inefficient step in the process is the 1.5 tonne shopping trolley we take them home in.

"The problem with plastic bags isn't anything to do with the energy required to produce them. It's that they pretty much don't *ever* decompose in landfill. A large percentage of them doesn't even get to landfill -- they simply blow away -- because they are so light, as you rightly point out"

A landfill is there specifically for things that don't decompose, so if you have plastic bags and can't recycle them then the landfill is the correct place for them to be. There's absolutely no problem with that.
And sorry I just don't believe "a large percentage of them doesn't even get to landfill -- they simply blow away".

A lot of nonsense is talked about plastic bags, especially their so-say effect on wildlife. The biggest rubbish hazard for marine life is discarded or lost fishing nets, line, and tackle.

Our household uses reuable shoppings bags, but we have no problems with getting a few plastic ones from the supermarket from time to time, they're so useful around the home, and the negative effect on the environment is miniscule.