Plastic Bags Tough to Recycle, Tougher to Ban
Medil Reports features news that a Lake County, Illinois task force wants to reduce plastic bag waste throughout the state, but will attempt to do so without banning plastic bags in retail stores.
Several cities have addressed plastic bag waste, with San Francisco being the first to propose a ban. Chicago has pursued banning plastic bags as recently as last May, particularly because the city does not provide a program to recycle them.
The Illinois General Assembly developed a pilot program to determine the costs for retailers of plastic bag recycling. The results will be studied sometime next month.
For locations to recycle plastic bags in your area, use the Earth 911 recycling locator search.
As of June 17th 2011 we have upgraded our comment system to use Facebook comments. The below comments are closed and are listed for historical purposes.
daddyivorg
posted on February 4th, 2008 at 2:45 am
Here in the UK, in The Lake District, the local authorities have made everyone recycle their household waste. We have to separate the trash into glass, paper, cardboard, glass and plastic containers. The only trash we have left is plastic packaging and food waste.
The weird thing is that now we have to do this a lot of us realise how much wasted plastic there is. In one town the shops all stopped giving out plastic bags and no one complained. I don’t think you have to ban something if hardly anybody wants to have or do whatever it is.
jzolnik
posted on February 5th, 2008 at 5:24 am
We will recycle all plastic bags at our facilitie if someone can convince the large stores to do so.All they care about is profit and not our green issues.We will even provide totes for their customers to return their plastic and give them a rebate.What else can you ask for.CRS. Ft Wayne, In.
ozzie1oddduck
posted on February 6th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Why is banning plastic bags a bad thing? If just 25% of U.S. families used 10 fewer plastic bags a month, we would save over 2.5 Billion bags a year. Do you realize there is no other cause, of any kind, that impacts every man, woman, and child on the planet more than environmental causes. At 1 Odd Duck, we think about these sorts of things on a regular basis. Check us out at http://www.1oddduck.com. If you like what you see, pass it along to your friends.
Common Sense 2 Global Green!!
urbanfrugal
posted on March 12th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I live in Chicago and decided to accept plastic bags from stores a few months ago. I do not miss them. I still had quite a few that I reuse at home. When I go to the store, I make a conscious effort to take my own bags. It is a great feeling to walk out of a store with 2 full shopping bags for a half cart of groceries rather than half a dozen plastic bags.
Plastic bags are useful but they shouldn’t be one time use items, or become unsightly “tree decorations” in our neighborhoods. If half of the people in Chicago and the rest of Northern Illinois accepted fewer bags we wouldn’t have to worry about banning them.
majikk1
posted on April 3rd, 2008 at 4:25 pm
comment to ozzie1oddduck – your link goes to a page that asks for a login name and password like its a secret site – dont make this difficult for people to find out about you – thanks!
kaylaaafitz
posted on October 27th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I witnessed a brilliant waste-reducing idea just the other day that was previously unprecedented to me:
I was waiting in the car as a friend of mine ran into a local grocery store to buy a couple of limes. An adorable, frail, middle-aged woman was exiting the store with a shopping cart filled to the brim with groceries. However, this plethora of vegetables and dairy products was not bagged. By this observation, I was surprised. How often is it that one does such a large amount of shopping and leaves without the infamous white, logo-covered, plastic bags? I was impressed by her lack of acceptance of plastic, yet I was also concerned. I tried to imagine this woman making 12 or some-odd trips up and down her drive way, then up and down the stairs, arms full of individual, bobbling items. Tedious and tiring.
Then, she opened her trunk. Her trunk was home to a tiny canvas bag containing knotted, plastic bags. She then, proceeded to bag her groceries. Reusing plastic bags from groceries, for groceries? We had an environmentally concerned genius on our hands. One does not have to go out and spend even a couple of dollars on enough decorated canvas bags to harness ones weekly grocery shopping – just use the bags from the time before! Store them in the trunk. Recycle them when, or if they break, using the proper facilities.
Who would have thought an American would have such an absence of laziness? Enough of an absence to not have the clerk bag their groceries, but to bag them, themselves. This gave me a warm, fuzzy, environmental friendly feeling. Just as I turned my head from the adorable, frail, middle-aged woman, my friend came out of the store with two miniscule limes in a plastic bag…
Rosemary
posted on January 21st, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Your site named my local Walmart as a place that recycles plastic bags. They first took the collection containers and moved them way in the back of the store instead at the Greeters stand. Next, they totally did away with the containers & couldn’t give me any reason why they stopped recycling plastic bags.
SW
posted on February 6th, 2009 at 8:10 pm
Superwalmart doesn’t give you a choice of paper or plastic…you just get plastic. So instead I just put all of my stuff one by one in my cart and took it out to my car where I took everything out one by one and put it my trunk. I didn’t need plastic or paper. Everything got home just fine. WOW that was easy
Diana
posted on March 18th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
It’s great that people are finally taking notice and the recycling of plastic bags seems to be gaining momentum. The focus, however, seems to be on recycling grocery an other stores’ plastic bags. It seems that most people are not aware that you can recycle all #2 and #4 plastic bags… including the bags your newspaper and bread come in, the plastic that is used by your cleaners to cover your clean shirts or dry cleaning, and other #2 and #4 plastic bags. A while back I emailed SC Johnson to ask what type of plastic their ziploc bags are made of. Turns out they are also recyclable. I emailed them again to say that they need to put the recycling code on the bags so EVERYONE knows to recycle them and they told me that had made a conscious decision not to do so. I went back and forth arguing with them for over a week before I gave up. They made a series of lame excuses. I was disgusted.