Since the coming of these bags, I have not had to purchase trash can liners for my small cans in YEARS. Larger bags fit my larger trash cans. I LOVE large bags.

I use heavy bags from my famous chain bookstore as my own book bags, or as I haul heavy projects to and from my work. Or as can liners when my kids are sick in bed. Thick bags= no holes.

I reuse plastic grocery bags to dispose of my grandkid’s dirty diapers and when I clean out the cat litter.

When all else fails, the ripped bags and bags with holes make GREAT packing material when I mail people stuff. It is lighter in weight than newspaper and costs less to ship a package when using this stuff. And my stuff never arrives broke in transit because it is such a great packaging material.

I consider plastic to be the ultimate most recycled product I use everyday in many ways.
I also recycle paper bags and the brown packing paper I get in shipments, but usually as decorated painted giftwrap and long pieces protect my work surfaces and make great pieces of paper to make my own pattern designs on.

I have been a recycler of bags before it was ever cool. I will always use plastic AND paper bags, and suggest to congress ,that if they ban ANYTHING, that it be themselves. I have no recycle use for “windbags.”

Many municipalities do not recycle plastic bags and that is a real shame. Most plastic shopping bags are, as you point out easily recyclable, and as cities as large as New York, for example, don’t allow consumers to throw them into the recycling bin (yes NYC’ers are supposed to put the bags in the trash) its nice to know that other cities and companies are doing something other than starting off with a ban. Why ban one perfectly recyclable material when other more dangerous materials such as polystyrene (widely used by school systems) are still not banned? Using wood (paper) can be less toxic but is not a perfect solution either. Unless we manage forrests and actually recycle, cutting down trees to replace plastic bags that could simply be managed more effectively raises red flags with me.

I have experimented with several items made from bio-active plastics any find none of them to bio-degrade very well in aerobic conditions (an oxygenated compost system) so I’m very skeptical of lab results that don’t translate to real life. But some products do seem to show evidence of a little break down. So there is hope.

I would gladly accept a sample of one of your bio-degrade products to be placed in a real world composting environment to see how it fares over a year or two. Will it really break down? How long is the breakdown process? It would be an interesting experiment (if not completely scientific).

Nice to see you are thinking green too. My company is totally overhauling its packaging and shipping with green components which is not as easy as we thought it would be. But we are learning and doing better step-by-step.