To kick off the Mom Blog Party I posted 20 + Ways to Reuse a Plastic Bag and encouraged visitors sure to share their favorite ways of reusing a plastic bag.While we'd like to see everyone converting over to reusable shopping bags, like My Green Sacs, until plastic bags are banned, we need to figure out ways of reusing the more than 100,000,000,000 (billion) plastic shopping bags used every year in the United States.
Visitors posted a lot of other great tips for saving green by reusing or recycling their plastic bags. Here are some more suggestions from our blog visitors.
Uses for Plastic Bags
Trash Can Liners
From That Crazy Mom We use our plastic bags for trash can liners also. I also use them for my regular kitchen trash. Rather than a big 13 gallon bag, I just put our garbage into the grocery bags then toss them in the kitchen trash.
We also have a local thrift store that takes the bags and reuses them to package up customer's purchases.
From callmekelly I actually just recycle all of the plastic bags I get, though I use cloth bags mostly so I don't have many. I find that may be better than using as liners. Instead, I don't use liners in the small trash cans but rinse them out when they do get dirty with collected rain water.
From ikkinlala We use our plastic grocery bags as garbage bags - if we tried to use full-sized garbage bags, it would stink too much before we got them full. We've been using cloth bags for a long time, but sometimes we need to leave them at home so that we'll have some bags for garbage.
Recycling Bag Programs
From Shannon I wish the grocery stores would actually get rid of plastic and paper bags and make everyone that wants groceries use the recycle bags!
Whenever I go to Wal-Mart though I try to remember to take any plastic bags I have received.
For Messy Jobs
From Angie I re-use plastic grocery bags for when I clean out the cat litter box.
From Monkey's Momma I am a nurse and when I did Home Health, one house I went to should have been declared unfit for inhabitation. Anyway, I would carry a ton of plastic Walmart bags with me in the car. Before I went in this house, I would step one foot in each bag, tie it around my ankle, and off I'd go. When I left the house, I removed the bags from my feet, then my gloves and disposed of them in another plastic bag.
- Note to the Go Green Tip Winners:
Everyone who shared a Green Tip is eligible to receive one of the My Green Doc Blog's “Go Green” or “Live Green” sticker in the mail.- You will also receive the Go Green, Live Green or Save Green image via email to use as as a blog badge.
To claim your prize, please send me an email to mygreendoc-at-gmail.com with the information I need to send you your “Go Green” or “Live Green” sticker and blog badge by May 31.
© 2008 Kirsti A. Dyer MD, MS, CWS. Some rights reserved.