You can often find glass jars & baby food jars at garage sales for 5 or 10 cents apiece,
& you can always post a "wanted" on craigslist or freecycle.

Starbucks here saves (when they remember) the silver bags for me, & I use them for flower pots.

Punch drainage holes in the bottom, cut some off the top to make the "pot" the right depth, & voila!

They're light in weight,
they don't absorb heat like the black nursery pots (roots literally cook in black plastic pots here in Texas),
& they take very little storage space when folded flat when they're empty.

I actually don't agree with banning plastic bags. (Would they still give away paper bags? That makes no sense to me.) But I think all stores should stop giving away any bags, as they're proposing in some areas.

Sure, I get also five cents off my purchases per bag. But that five cent discount doesn't motivate anyone. Instead, we should charge a 25 cent surcharge at the grocery stores per plastic/paper bag required by customers. That'll get people to look at reusable bags!

Part of the surcharge could go to supporting the development of new or improved recycling facilities or other "greening" projects. How cool would that be?

But if you simply think that plastic is "evil", as many seem to, consier this quote: "[i]t's easier to recycle and takes less energy to produce and ship than some glass." They also note that recyclable plastic is better than wax cartons... but I think we all knew that. :)

Just food for thought.

Then again, our city is so bad that our recycling program doesn't even accept cardboard curbside. They also only accept plastics 1 and 2. I cringed when I realized that the organic lettuce I bought a while ago came in a plastic bin marked 5 - unrecyclable in our area. :sigh:

If I'm going to buy a container of juice, the point is that I'm not necessarily doing anything special by buying the juice in recyclable glass bottles over recyclable plastic bottles. Both take energy to transport and both take energy to recycle. The bigger issue is: which takes less energy to transport and recycle? Considering the weight, I can say that plastic certainly takes less energy to transport. I can't say about the recycling process any more than what the excerpt from Self said.

If it's the option of recyclable plastic vs. landfill wax carton, I think it's an even clearer decision.

Ultimately, as you said, reusing is better than recycling, and reducing is better than reusing. Reduce>Reuse>Recycle. Ultimately, I daresay that any of the three is worlds better than landfill.

I'd like a solid reference for the last statement. If that's truly the case, I'd like to help spread the word. But I must be able to support it.

Until we can find a source then recycling can't be held up as an option that is necessarily better.

Also I was just addressing the crowd, no one in particular.

My whole point is that recycling is not with out draw back, and if it has an unknown drawback (to you and I) then you should be able to wrap your head around that drawback being possibly worse than the alternative, unless you are holding on to an unfounded belief, in which case you should lose it or find a foundation for it.

You bring up the fuel for transportation and melting. Glass uses fuel for the very same processes. Because plastic weighs less than glass, and because a bottle can be made with far less plastic than glass, it's very likely that products packaged in plastic use less fuel both in distribution and in collection of recycling materials. Again, I cannot and do not attempt to say which uses less fuel in the recycling process.

The belief that I'm holding on to is pretty much the accepted statement by every green/conservation group around. Keep crap out of landfills, partly by recycling when it's not possible to reduce or resuse. I don't know why I should find a foundation for that anymore than I should find a foundation for believing that my body runs better on vegetables than twinkies. Since you challenged that widely accepted idea that recycling > landfill, I'd expect you to provide some support.

But OK. You go your way and I'll go mine, and eventually we'll both find out that we both were wrong. ::grin::

Pax.

And I don't want them putting chicken in with my produce unless it's in a plastic bag. Even Whole Foods suggests putting chicken in a plastic bag even if I'm asking for paper bags.

My local Safeway recycles plastic bags. I bundle them up and every once in a while, take them in, and stuff them into the recycling bin.

I suppose I'll be attacked for this view, but I'm tired of people with money thinking it's okay to charge other people for their "transgressions" whether they can afford it or not.

Rather than punishing people, a far better tactic -- IMO -- would be to reward shoppers 25 cents for every reusable bag they use, or reward them for the plastic bags they bring in to recycle.

And, btw, I do compost and reuse. Kitty litter pails make great plant pots.

Again, I'm not rooting for or against any particular product, I just think we should think first and then act, or act and think then consider acting differently, but thinking has to be part of the solution. If you watch sheep you see them flock one way, and the flock can change direction and behave differently, but they have no reason to think that the changed direction is any better, they can narrowly avoid getting away from a predator too. The environmental damage and waste aren't the problem, they are a symptom of the problem, the real problem is people being intellectually lazy and not thinking, a Few dozen hours spent figuring out what is best to do willl go alot further in the long run than a few dozen hours doing potentially the wrong thing.

Paul McCartney I believe it was bought the new lexus hybrid before it came out, and to get it to him as rapidly as possible Toyota shipped it air cargo, emitting more green house gases than the car could every possibly save.

There are many plastic things I can do without in preference to another material. It doesn't have to be just food packaging. I use glass and ceramic refrigerator storage containers. I'm sure I have the first set of corning ware someone ever gave me and they've still got another thirty years of miles on them. If I absolutely have to have a snap tight plastic container, and sometimes I do, then I have a couple of good quality ones you would not consider disposable. Disposable is sometimes necessary, but not for every day life!

The products I must buy in plastic, I buy the biggest size I can use and then just refill the smaller containers. I even serve my bar-b-ques and picnic meals on real plates. I save the inevitable plastic bags one gets anyway from stores to tuck the dirty dishes back into a basket to wash later. If I have a party with lots of kids, who usually will grab a new plastic cup each time they want a drink, I mark their names on them so they can reuse them for refills. And when I buy soda, which I don't buy a lot of, I make sure to buy the largest plastic liter bottle I can, instead of individual cans or plastic bottles for use at home.

For example in Target, "I can't find the tag."
Me, "I already purchased the bag."
Cashier, "Oh...do you want me to put the stuff in the bag"?
Me, "Yes, put it all in the bag."
And, I've found myself explaining that if everything I buy can fit in the bag, put it in my reusable bag. I don't need two items in the reusable bag and one in a plastic, just to lighten the load.

I've also gone in stores, hand the cashier a resuable bag and a second later see the cashier dismissing the bag and placing my goods in plastic bags. Really!?

Sarah

1) At stores where they empty your cart, I typically cover the food at the near-to-them end of the cart with my bags. I had a cashier pick up the bags and toss them back to the cart, by the child seat. "Um, those are my grocery bags. Could you please use those?"

2) Many cashiers try to find the price, of course.

3) Wal-mart clerks (yeah, I know, evil Wallyworld - I'm working on it) are most often very perplexed when I wanted them to use my bags. Often the only way they understand the concept is if I just have them pile up the groceries and I bag them. I had another Wallyworld clerk reluctantly use the bags, but then place the big duffelbag I was purchasing in a plastic bag. Um, no. That's not quite what I'm trying to accomplish.

4) Eggs do not need to be placed in their own special plastic bag while I have half-empty cloth bags. Really. Thanks. I once had a bagger who was clearly very distressed at my request that the eggs just go on top of my nearly full bag. He was visibly reassured and relaxed when I said, "I promise I won't be mad if they break." You could actually see his whole posture change and hear his blood pressure go down. Poor kid.

I understand that it's frequently simply course of habit that they use plastic right after I hand them the bags, but other times it's definitely people who are unclear on the concept.

Oh, on a related note:

5) Can we please have a button added to self-checkouts so that I don't have to pile up all my groceries like an idiot on the scales, then finally bag them after paying?!? I have yet to find a system that doesn't complain when it feels my (rather light) bags on the scale. Man, I hate looking like that much of a freak because of their moronic system, and I feel awful that it makes people behind me wait longer.

I too, or my boyfriend, will usually ask to bag when in grocery stores where the cashier is expected to bag.

Sarah

witeowl - the eggs only thing is probably so ingrained in the kids from their training that it may take a little time to adapt....being the creatures of habit that we are.

Sarah

Did you know it costs roughly $4,000 to recycle enough plastic bags to be resold for $100? Tell me somebody's not getting some subsidies there, so we're paying for those bags anyway.