Plastic bags are one of my bugbears - the abundance of them, and the unncessary-ness of many of the instances of them, really bother me. But I think what's needed to address the issue of plastic bags is a seachange, rather than a small fix. It's nice that shops are now charging for single use bags, but really, if you want to make a serious difference, you have to charge 50p per bag, not 5p. Personally, I'd like to see no plastic carrier bags available in shops, full stop. If you are going to the shop, take a bag with you; it's not rocket science.
I read recently that plastic carrier bags were originally developed to help with deforestation issues - to replace paper bags. And I can see why that would have been a good thing originally. The problem for me is the fact that so many plastic bags are single use - even ones which are not designed to be.
We need bags all the time. I personally use bags a lot. The issue comes with which ones, and how they are used. And reused. Or not.
I've been taking my own bags to the supermarket for so many years I can't even count any more - certainly the entire time I've lived in the UK (over 25 years). I used to have "bags for life" - the thicker plastic ones - and I've gradually moved to even more sturdy ones. It's so incredibly easy to take your own bags to the supermarket, that it really bothers me when people object to doing it. I just keep some in the boot of my cars. Then they are always there, and always ready to be used. Or if I'm walking to the shop, I take some from the house before I go.
Ok, I do buy bags to line my kitchen bin with, and I know that some people who take "single-use" bags from the supermarket may use them for rubbish instead of buying bin liners, which is fair enough. But the vast majority of people who take supermarket bags are just lazy or don't care. And that annoys me.
These are a couple of small cloth bags which I keep in my rucksack/handbag so I always have a bag with me when I go out, just in case. This is easy to do. Harder if you don't carry a bag of some sort, but even so, if you are going out to somewhere where you might buy something, it's easy to throw a small plastic or cloth bag in your pocket.
In our house, we do keep all the single use bags we end up with - we don't end up with many these days, but if we do (e.g. if you buy something from duty free on an airplane they won't let you not have a bag or if someone gives me something already in a plastic bag) - and we reuse these. Many of them multiple times.
It's not just carrier bags that we keep and reuse, either. Sometimes smaller things come in bags, and you can't avoid it - here we have some instances of bread. Luckily, these are the soft plastic bags, not the crinkly kind (which unfortunately, usually just have to be thrown away), so they are easy to shake out, or rinse lightly, and reuse.
We keep a jar of this sort of bag - any bag that can be reused, is reused. We use these for bread that didn't come in a bag in the first place (e.g. farmers market bread), sandwiches for Alex's lunch (he can then throw the bag away in good conscience - and he also sometimes uses wax wraps, too), putting things in for the freezer: really, anything which you'd use a bought plastic bag for.
And yes, I still do have a selection of bought plastic bags, but these are all reused as much as possible as well (except the green ones, which are for the food waste bin) - I haven't bought a new box of small bags in well over a year (I actually know this for a fact, because I was curious how many we used, so I started dating the boxes of bags to see how often I bought them and the newest date on them is November 2018; most of them pre-date my dating system!). The ones with the zip tops, we rinse and use again. Some of the freezer bags (the blue ones) maybe only get used once (particularly if they've had meat in them), but we use so few of them, that once they are eventually gone, I won't buy new ones, I'll just use the reused bread bags for what I use these for now.
And of course, fresh produce from the supermarket sometimes needs to be bagged - I have small, reusable bags of several sorts for this. I don't really bother with larger items (cabbage, broccoli, courgettes) but if I am buying a kilo of tomatoes, they do need a bag to allow them to be easily weighed and not squished in the shopping bag.
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