I had the opportunity to chat personally about 9 months ago with a city councillor who's heavily involved in the environmental movement and was very knowledgeable about our municipal waste system.  We were talking about all the buzz about plastic bags, the distribution of them in stores, and their use in the system itself (as storage devices). We had a bit of a debate about compostable bags, and while really informative, it was sort of inconclusive.

Here's the backstory... A few months before I moved to this place (early 2008), while still living alone in a building that had full municipal green bin, recycling, and garbage pickup, I finally saw the light (and the excessive amount of plastic accumulating in my kitchen) and started a habit of bringing bags with me to stores and rejecting the plastic bags they offered (or, often, forced).  All my life, I've been pretty good with the bags I did get -- get the groceries out of them, and store them for use in garbage bins. Every bin in my home has a plastic bag in it - it saves from having to clean the bins and prevents them from smelling.  I eventually used up my stock (before I moved) and had to start thinking about alternatives.  Obviously, if you have used plastic bags around, then they're really the only option -- they're something that have no other use and would otherwise end up IN the garbage, so of course they should get used from something before they end up there.

I turned to my local eco store, Grass Roots.  There I bought bags that claimed to be 100% biodegradable (made from corn), and I've since purchased other similar bags that didn't say what they were made of.  From that point until last fall I used them in the green bin, as they were heavily promoted and labelled for such use.

When the city demanded that stores start charging for plastic bags, they also came out with a bunch of other regulations around them.  One of the biggest ones was the introduction of curbside recycling for regular (non-biodegradable) plastic bags - something most municipalities have had for years. In addition, banning things like bags made of multiple/composite materials (like plastic bags with drawstrings), was to ban biodegradable plastic bags.  Uh oh, I thought, have I been doing something wrong?  If these can't be given out in stores, are they also bad for general use?

I wondered why and, after some inquiry, got some answers (most of which were from this discussion I alluded to earlier).  There are basically three places these bags could end up. The first, one I already knew the answer to, is the garbage system.  My environmental engineer friends taught me years ago that biodegradable matter in the dump = bad. It biodegrades (only a little, due to the way dumps are designed -- apparently one can find petrified banana peels in dumps that are decades old), and lets off all its methane and other gases into the atmosphere - bad for the planet on so many levels.  Next - in the recycling system (the city's biggest worry since they were introducing the ability to recycle plastic bags).  This is bad for more obvious reasons -- recycled plastic is often used in things like furniture or carpets, which one would definitely NOT want to degrade naturally over time.  The third possible destination is in the compost system, either inside a bag because we know/think it'll biodegrade (along with all those "biodegradable" plastic water bottles that were a flash-in-the-pan a couple years ago), or as the containing device.  This one has been more ambiguous -- the best answer I can get for why this is bad is that when the bags are put through these system, they leave a plastic residue that is toxic for plants... which is also pretty bad. [Regular plastic bags used to contain compost, in theory, are supposed to be separated from the compost matter in processing by skimming it off the top of the material after it's pulped]

In the interim, the whole argument has become moot since my roommate had a really bad habit of bringing home lots and lots of plastic bags from Chinatown where, he claims, they give them to you whether you like it or not.  [I dispute that, but that's not the subject of this post].  Since the new requirement to charge for bags, apparently, they've gotten better and will actually ASK if you want a bag (heavens!) so only recently have we become short of plastic bags again.  I've been using up my (apparently larger than I'd thought) supply of the biodegradable bags, since the other option was to throw them directly in the garbage which seemed like a total waste.

So, now, I'm stuck with the question -- what do I use to line a) garbage bins and b) green bins in my home?  The only options available to me seem to be 1) pay the 5 cents to get a limited number of grocery bags to keep using them, 2) the biodegradable made-from-corn bags from the store, or 3) virgin plastic bags purchased in bulk from a store.  I've searched high and low for 100% post-consumer recycled plastic bags that are small enough for household bins but had no success (the smallest I can find are kitchen-sized, which I DO use for our kitchen garbage (not green bin)).  If anyone has suggestions for other alternatives, I'd love to hear them.

So, first, for the green bin -- Given a recent Star article about our green bin system and how the plastic in the bags that contains the bio matter ends up in the system anyway, I've been leaning towards buying more biodegradable bags.  At least if the bag encasing the bio matter is going to stay in the compost, it might as well be partly biodegrable as opposed to completely not biodegradable.  But given the uncertainty over whether or not it does in fact biodegrade (the Composting Council, an industry group, insists that it does... but they seem to be the only ones), it's not a 'perfect' option.  The other argument I've heard made against this (that I agree with to an extent) is that corn (and farming in general) should be for food and with all the hungry people in the world there's no reason to artificially support the corn industry any more than the US government is already doing (the only reason corn-made plastics are so cheap is that the US government subsidizes corn so heavily that it sells below the cost of production).  These uses of food products partly offsets the subsidies and effectively increases global food prices, causing all sorts of human disasters.  Not to mention all the environmental cost that goes into converting corn into plastic.  The alternatives aren't much better though -- grocery store bags and store-bought bin liners are generally made from virgin (or at most ~30% recycled, usually pre-consumer) plastic -- oil.  I'll save the rant for another day on the oil industry, but there are so many many many things wrong with consuming oil in any way that that idea is equally abhorrent.  I suspect the only difference between these two options is the price - I'd have to figure out if 5 cents per bag is more or less than what I'd pay to buy a box of bags.  And then there's still the problem of the plastic ending up in the system, as the Star article suggests (and the city denies).  The councillor I chatted with suggested paper -- but paper bags are highly impractical when it comes to green bins (even if waxed), not to mention the impact of virgin paper making (i.e., tree farming or clear cutting) on the environment and utter lack of 100% post-consumer recycled waxed paper bags designed for use in green bin system.  So now that I've eliminated all options.... I'm at a loss.

I have the same problem with regular garbage containers. Thankfully for the kitchen I have the 100% recycled plastic bags, and fruit/vegetable bags from the grocery store (which are unfortunately still difficult to avoid) fit nicely in my bathroom garbage container and if I have them from Loblaws or Valu Mart they fit in my bedroom garbage... but I still have a container in my office that needs to be a bit bigger than that, and is.  It's a typical wastebasket which in theory needn't have a bag but given I often snack in the office and throw out food wrappers (a whole other problem), one is needed. I've been using the aforementioned biodegradable bags, again just to use them up (as I'd previously decided never to buy them again), but that's obviously a bad result for the reasons mentioned before (bio matter in dumps = bad).  The same problems as above arise for the grocery store or bulk-purchased bags, given the process they go through to get to me, though this use has a slightly better end result - non-bio matter in a dump which will likely take a very long time to decompose, which is sort of the point of a dump.

And now, I'm at a loss.  Does anyone have any other solutions?? What do you use to line your green bins? Your wastebaskets?? I'd love any suggestions - all the options available to me seem to have terrible environmental consequences and they're all bad for different reasons.  

On a related note - I've just completed what feels like almost a year (though likely 6-8 months) of digitizing all my VHS tapes and have three shelves full of them... my audio tapes are next... anyone knows if they can be recycled? I suspect not but it seems so wasteful to throw them all out!

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