What do you do with the plastic bags from the grocery store?
We use ours to line small trash cans. I keep them in 2 Kleenex boxes until I go to use them.
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I also save and reuse shopping bags at home for the bathroom trash can and when there are a ton of kitchen scraps that need to be thrown out, the veggies scraps go in to a compost pile in the backyard.
I also save shopping bags to take to school when I volunteer for the bookfairs. Our librarian is very good at saving all of her plastic bags so when she runs low I have mine. We end up giving out almost all of them by the end of bookfair, and we have 2 a year so that is a lot of bags. The bookfair company only gives us enough for maybe 1 day of bookfair, we need enough for 5 days.
I also find that a lot of parents save the bags and recycle them when we give them some too. So instead of a bag being used 1 or 2 times it is possibly used 3 or more times.
My husband saves all of the black grocery bags they tend to be smaller and he takes his lunch to work with it. He will use it until it breaks. We don’t get many black bags with no print, he likes it because it doesn’t have any advertisements of it and no one can see what he has in his bag. I know he is weird like that!!! Gotta Love him though.
If you do have too too many bags I know stores like Shoprite have bins where you can recycle the bags, and some will give you credit for reusing a bag or using reusable bags.
What plastic bags? I take reusable bags to the grocery so I don’t have to deal with “the plastic bag monster” (as we used to call it).
In addition to the small trash cans, I stash away a couple whenever I travel for dirty clothes. Instead of possibly mixing in with the clean clothes, I put them in a bag and then throw them into the wash or laundry basket when I get home.
In addition to those listed above, we also use ours for packaging for shipping for ebay, etc.
I didn’t see anyone post this idea, although I know I’m not the only one that does this with their grocery bags…
For those of us that live in the South….it’s so hot in the summers, but probably NOT a whole lot of us can actually AFFORD to run the air conditioning the way that we would like. That means bumping up the thermostat during the day.
I use my grocery bags to put meat scraps and meat packaging stuff in and take it out immediately to the curb trash can so I don’t go through so many large kitchen trash bags. Believe me, if you put stuff like this in your garbage (say the can was only half full)… and then came home after your house was a bit warm most of the day while you were at work…you’re house does not smell great! Especially if you’ve been peeling shrimp, etc during gumbo season!
I also do the same as others and use them to clean and empty the litterboxes every day. Hope this gives people some ideas!
We bought a trash can at the Container Store that is intentionally sized to take grocery bags. We use it in the kitchen. It’s small, but we empty it out every day anyway. I love it.
We do all the traditional thing with the bags. Clean the cat boxes, the bunny cage, the guinea pig cage, the hamster cage, the lizard cage….. :) and I use them to carry stuff or send veggies from our garden home with other people. But I recently found 2 new uses for them that I think are a lot of fun. First, my daughter had to make a recycle craft for 4H and made a decorator pillow for her dad out of one of his order Disneyland TShirts and she stuffed it with….plastic shopping bags. It worked great. Second, I found an awesome pattern that shows how you can KNIT a new reusable shopping bag out of 20 plastic grocery bags. Isn’t that cool!!! Hope I don’t screw up the pattern. :)
The ones with holes we use for trash that is recycled. The good ones are used for food garbage an non recycling trash.
I love the idea of storing the bags in a kleenex box. Mine are currently in a pile in my pantry! We do use them for trashbags in the bathroom and we did the double bagging when my son was in diapers…But going 2 weeks now and no diapers!! Yay!!
We love using them for our garbage can, it really saves a lot of money! I like to store them in empty baby wipe containers, it is amazing how many I can fit in there!
We have yard sales in our community twice a year so I save the bags and use them to bag merchandise from the yard sale for people. After that they are just used as trash bags.
I use them for: line small trash cans, put a couple in the car for trash, put stinky grody diapers in, wrap stuff up in when mailing items, and when as trash bags if we are cleaning out a room. Easier to use them and have a couple of small bags than try to keep up with a big trash bag.
We donate ours to a food pantry right down the road that reuses them for the food they hand out,
When I got married, my husband showed me that! His mom had been doing it for years! We now have 3 kids and a little trash can just doesn’t work in the kitchen anymore, but we still use them in the bathrooms and bedroom trash bins. I also use them for donating things, trash bags for the car (what a good idea, using the kleenex box!), and I recently saw how someone used them to make loops, which they then used for knitting. If I knew how to knit, I’d try it out! :D I also use them when I hold garage sales, people always need a way to carry home their loot! :)
This isnt for bags but I keep my grocery store bags in an old wipes container
I use mine to scoop cat poop from the litter box : )
Stinky diapers and the bathroom trashes. We typically don’t have too many though since we have a ton of reusable grocery bags.
We use them for dog waste bags when we go on walks, for trash bags in our small trash cans and for cleaning out the guinea pig cage…..we keep them in our pantry in a large bag on the back of the door.
We use them for the kitty litter, trash can (recycling is WAY BIGGER then the regular trash these days) and used to use them for diapers until we went to cloth.
Any ones with holes go back to the stores into the plastic bag recycling box.
I use them to put the kitty poop in each night when the litter box get cleaned up
We use ours to line small garbage cans, pick up after the dog and to pack up hand-me downs and donations.
We take them back to the store and reuse them until they get worn enough to do that. After that we use them for trash.
Use to stake your tomato plants, to tie other things together in a pinch, toss in the pool/water park bag for wet clothes/shoes, store one strand of Christmas lights in each bag to keep them all untangled for the next year, wrap your camera and other electronics in when you are out with the kids and ,ay have other wet things in your bag
we use ours as backup dog waste bags. We walk our dog every night and if we forget to buy bags we reuse the plastic bags from the store. We have also used them in the small bathroom trash cans, as well as for diapers. We never just toss our plastic bags out, we always reuse them!
We use ours for Dirty Diapers. Diaper Genies are gross and we take the garbage out every day anyway. Double bag it!
Good idea! :)
That’s what we do too!