Their blue recycling bag is made of RPET mesh to allow recycling to air dry and has a reinforced base so it doesn’t leak. Kwik Bagit also offers an adjustable telescoping bag holder that allows nearly any size of bag to be secured with retainer clips that hold the bag in place while being filled. Canadian company Kwik Bagit makes reusable, washable bag models meant to collect your recycling and yard waste. There aren’t a lot of reusable trash bag alternatives on the market yet. We’ve rounded up a few greener trash bag alternatives for your consideration to help you reduce your single-use plastic trash bag consumption. This bag research makes public radio's love for tote bags awkward, doesn't it? It might be weird, though, if we started giving out plastic grocery bags.ĭid you enjoy this newsletter? Well, it looks even better in your inbox! You can sign up here.Are you on your way to a zero waste household? If you haul your trash to the curb every week in a plastic trash bag, figuring out a more sustainable alternative to that plastic bag can be challenging. The best policy, Taylor says, imposes a fee on both paper and plastic bags and encourages reuse.
Taylor is concerned this will drive up paper use.
#Trash without plastic bags free#
It bans only plastic bags and gives free rein to using paper ones ( counties have the option to impose a 5-cent fee on them). Taylor believes the recent legislation passed in New York is a bad version of the policy. But a fee offers flexibility for people who reuse plastic bags for garbage disposal or dog walking.
She has a second paper showing a small fee for bags is just as effective as a ban when it comes to encouraging use of reusable bags. Those still have to be used dozens and dozens of times to be greener than plastic grocery bags, which have the smallest carbon footprint for a single use.Īs for bag policies, Taylor says a fee is smarter than a ban. According to the Danish study, the best reusable ones are made from polyester or plastics like polypropylene. The most environment-friendly way to carry groceries is to use the same bag over and over again. That said, the Danish government's estimate doesn't take into account the effects of bags littering land and sea, where plastic is clearly the worst offender. They estimate you would have to use an organic cotton bag 20,000 times more than a plastic grocery bag to make using it better for the environment. These factors make cloth bags even worse. The Danish government recently did a study that took into account environmental impacts beyond simply greenhouse gas emissions, including water use, damage to ecosystems and air pollution. government found a person would have to reuse a cotton tote bag 131 times before it was better for climate change than using a plastic grocery bag once. What about reusable cloth bags? We know die-hard public radio fans love them! They've got to be great, right?Ī 2011 study by the U.K. That said, these bans do reduce nonbiodegradable litter. While paper is biodegradable and avoids some of the problems of plastic, Taylor says, the huge increase of paper, together with the uptick in plastic trash bags, means banning plastic shopping bags increases greenhouse gas emissions. They require cutting down and processing trees, which involves lots of water, toxic chemicals, fuel and heavy machinery. A bunch of studies find that paper bags are actually worse for the environment. Plastic haters, it's time to brace yourselves. On top of that, cities that banned plastic bags saw a surge in the use of paper bags, which she estimates resulted in about 80 million pounds of extra paper trash per year. "So about 30 percent of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags," Taylor says. Trash bags are thick and use more plastic than typical shopping bags. She also analyzed these stores' sales data. For six months, they spent weekends in grocery stores tallying the types of bags people carried out (she admits these weren't her wildest weekends). Taylor and colleagues compared bag use in cities with bans with those without them.
It's a classic tale of unintended consequences.īefore California banned plastic shopping bags statewide in late 2016, a wave of 139 California cities and counties implemented the policy themselves. Taylor recently published a study of bag regulations in California. "Yeah, these policies might be following me," she jokes.
University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor started studying bag regulations because it seemed as though every time she moved for a new job - from Washington, D.C., to California to Australia - bag restrictions were implemented shortly after.
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