Purple Bags on a Biner

[walkitout]

Here are the Purple Bags:



After getting annoyed -- again -- at the paper towel re-users, I stopped and thought for a few minutes. I try to avoid doing this, because it really brings out the worst in me. But sometimes, I just have to.

We do sometimes come home with plastic bags. It is Unfortunate. Sometimes we didn't realize we would be going shopping. Sometimes, takeout was involved. Obviously, we do what everyone else does and use them to line small waste-baskets, mostly in bathrooms.

We store them in these:



One upstairs, one down.

For context:



It's a short trip from the dispenser to the bin.

But if you are anything like us, then plastic bags come in far faster than the trash goes out. So we had to reduce the incoming flow of plastic bags by bringing our own bags to the market. I tried a lot of different strategies. Mostly, the bags stayed at home, or in the trunk of my car.

Then I got these (first an earlier round of two pink bags; this is my second set, of four because that's about what I'll usually wind up needing). They self-stuff (I showed one open, three closed, two attached to a regular biner, one closed and loose). They have mini biners that are too small to attach to anything useful and too fiddly to loop together. So they all live on a regular biner.

The regular biner lives by the door to the garage, with the keys (this is an older photo, from July when I was walking around the house taking pictures of organizational Things):



From there, it can be hooked to a handbag handle, dumped into a tote, looped onto a belt or belt loop, whatever. It usually makes it to the store with me.

You have to wash reusable bags or they get stinky. Sometimes I leave the biners on, but usually I take them off when I put them in the wash, because that's how the pink bags lost their biners (I think). I let them air dry, rather than put them in the dryer. They are nylon, or something similar.

They are purple, because Purple is My Favorite Color, and has become a theme. If it's purple, it must belong to me -- no confusion, minimal risk of "theft" by others in the household (the kids borrow them to play store sometimes, but I generally corral them by the end of the day).

This strategy evolved over time. It's extremely difficult to get rid of plastic bags, so if you are trying to do so, don't be hard on yourself. Those suckers are sneaky. But this is part of my Religion of Stuff that I retain a lot of faith in.

Comments

[rolandgo.livejournal.com]

If you remember, you can try to stuff a bag of poly bags into the inevitably full container at the supermarket. From there they are said to be recycled (they are made out of the same stuff as soda bottles), but I suspect a lot of them go to a landfill or incinerator. If they go into single stream recycling (like they did in Seattle, but not here), they pretty much need to be picked out of the stream first and by hand.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Now that Seattle doesn't allow plastic shopping bags, we accidentally accumulate paper bags instead, but as we use those for garbage and recycling under the sink, as well as sometimes reusing them for shopping, the pile-up doesn't get too bad (and anyway if we get desperate they're recyclable/compostable). The last few times I've had to replace the bin liner in the bathrooms I've been reduced to the cover from the 12-pack of toilet paper.

I did just discover that several of our cloth shopping bags are small enough to fit in one of the water bottle pockets on my purse, so now I have a better chance of remembering to take bags with me.