I had the s.o. pickup the reusable bags at Stop&Shop because I hate when she comes home with so many plastic bags that just end of getting thrown away. Such a waste

 

[QUOTE=scho01,Mar 13 2008, 11:14 AM] We use neither........we bring our own cloth bags, AND get 5 cents back per bag!!

 

my parents used to shop weekly at Heartland when i was a kid and then hit Caldors next door.

 

Like many, we use the bags at home for trash. We get paper and plastic double bagged. They make great garbage bags.

 

this is a pet peeve of mine. I hate the plastics. A grocery order can easily go through 20 of those damn things, sometimes with 1 item in it. What's worse is when +1 does the groceries solo and asks for paper and gets paper in plastic. Twice as wasteful. One of these days, I'm going to go with her, request PAPER ONLY. Let them double bag then make them repack into paper only.

Any weight in them turn the handels into garrottes for the hands.

That said, +1 has several large LL Bean totes she usually brings with her. The baggers are stunned at how effecient they are.

The other thing that p!$$eS me off about these is that the baggers get no training on bagging. Whatever comes down first gets tossed in the bottom of the bag. Straberries under dog food cans? Yeah, thet makes sense.

Many years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and I was in high school, I worked at a grocery store. We used the bigger paper bags and were taught to stack things square so the bags wouldn't fall over in people's cars. We also learned right quick that big and hard goes on the bottom and stuff like soft fruit goes on top.

A recent article talked about how one of the local chains, Big Y was going more environmentally conscious with bigger, heavier plastic bags that would hold more.

 

I agree the apartment complex I'm in it's easier to use one bag for garbage and one for recyclables. I also use them for the cat litter and as a scooper bag for my dog. In fact I go to Sam's Club and buy a box of 1000 t-shirt bags because I use them so much.

 

Isn't it we will use more paper bags then? Poor trees.

 

x2. Thats how Sarah and I do it. We use 1 bag to hold all the others. After a few months we recycle them right at the grocery store on our way in for more shopping.

 

it may sound odd to some today but I absolutely agree.
bagging was an artform. visually sorting the order as it came down the chute to know what would go where and what would fit.
a good bagger could put a cart full of groceries into 5 or 6 bags that were just the right weight.
it sounds odd but there was a degree of pride in being able to do it well.

of course then again maybe that's just my type A showing again.

 

full disclosure, I work in the industry that makes machinery to make these beauties.

That said the super thin ones the grocery store uses are often a bit of a headache but sometimes they can be the best alternative...
BTW I do not claim to have particularly secret special knowlede and most of the following is just my opinion based on what ive heard or read somewhere.

we will start with a few environmental confusions that make many seemingly valid arguments still a bit of a toss up. and then a buch of tother points of interest.

1. Paper and the chemicals and wastewater used to generate it often is as enviromentally unfriendlly as the plastic.

2. Recycling is only valid to a point
A. Many people try to recycle what they don't repurpose but that doesn't mean that the amount of bags that end up in those recycling bins is anywhere near the amount consumed.
B. Produceres of these bags rarely to never use significant amounts of post-consumer recycled polymers in new bags, why? because a thermal cycle of the polymer can lead to degredation and beyond a certain amount of reclaim the production process is prone to overly processed poly making weak spots or burnt spots. This causes an unnacceptably high amount of bag failure or cosmetic failure that the store won't accept on behalf of us consumers. and believe me the producers already shove as much reprocessed polymer into this stuff as they can for their own economics it has nothing to do with the environment.
C. The energy used to recapute re-peletize and re-use post consumer waste is often more than the original energy utilized to refine(in a typical chemical reactor) the gaseous BY PRODUCTS of refining oil for other uses (yes most of the gaseous raw material is "free" as it would otherwize be burned up as waste itself"

3. humans are lazy and forgetful. we will never remember our little special cloth bags on every trip to the store and the price they want to charge you for another (that they made in china for 20 cents) means you won't buy another one so a ban on paper and plastic would make consumers angry.

4. I don't want my cloth bag covered in salmonella either, and you arent about to get rid of the little ones for fruits and veggies so we should be able to come up with some sort of compromize here.

5. lack of bagger training is no excuse for underloading or overloading and waste of these engineered load carying receptacles. nor does shoving everthing is the same type of bag make any sense. look at what the liqour stores do or places like BJ's. why aren't the stores repurposing the cardbord boxes for heavy stuff, i'll recycle it or burn it when I get home. different goods need different carying devices and even some high school kid should be able to be taught, hell put up a sign for recommended usage so the stupid consumer can learn too.

6. They should also make cloth more consumer cost effective, so that I might shove a couple dozen cloth bags in the back of the car, and bring them in with me. cause lets face if i'm not going to run back out to the car after unloading the groceries and i'm not going to stop back at the house on the way home from work before running to the store to pick up a few things.

...
maybe more later I have to work....