Creative Ways to Recycle Plastic Bags

Plastic bags are one of the biggest waste items to the environment. Every year, 380 billion (with a “b”) are used in the United States alone. Global estimates put the number used every year at almost a trillion bags. In other words, approximately one million plastic bags are being used and thrown away every minute.

The damage to the environment is huge.  Why? For one, they’re not biodegradable. They never break down. They just sit there. If they make their way into wildlife or marine life, they’ll often choke animals. Turtles, for instance, can mistake them for jellyfish. They try to eat them, then die when the plastic bags expand in their stomach.

Long story short: Throwing them away is bad and contributes to a massive global problem.

Recycling is better, but still not the ideal option. Recycling uses a lot of energy and also produces harmful chemical residues in and of itself. Instead, reusing your plastic bags is perhaps the #1 way to help the environment – while saving money.

Here are a few ways you can reuse your plastic bags.

Use It as a Trash Bag

Use it in your kitchen, in your bedrooms or in the bathroom as a trash bag. This way, you don’t have to buy garbage bags. You can even keep reusing each bag until it tears. Alternatively, you can just use each bag once and throw it out. Chances are, you’ll never run out of trash bags.

Doggy Poop Bags

Instead of buying doggy poop bags or using zip lock bags, just use your plastic bags. Save up your plastic bags. If you accumulate a lot of bags, this is a fantastic way to put them to use.

Use It to Collect Leaves

Do you use leaf bags to help manage your garden? Instead of using other bags, why not just use your existing plastic bags instead?

As a Food Storage Tool

A lot of foods are incredibly messy to store. For example, flour can get all over the place once you’ve opened it. If you should ever need to store something messy like spices or flour, you can easily just store it in a plastic bag and twist the top to close.

Tear It Up for Packaging

Shred up your used plastic bags and use them for packaging. Instead of using newspaper or buying bubble wrap, just collect your old plastic bags and crumple them up.

As you can tell, there are a lot of ways to put these bags to use. Of course, the best environmental course is to use your own bags whenever possible. If you do build up plastic bags, however, don’t throw them away – reuse them instead. Now you know how.

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