Personally I would be glad to see paper bags come back, especially the heavy ones with handles. I hate those plastic bags.
For one thing, groceries are harder to pack in plastic bags and they don’t hold as much as paper bags. And I count how many times I’ve gotten home to find some of my groceries have rolled out because the bags don’t stand up and are slippery and tend to slide and roll around (in the back of my gas guzzling SUV of course – maybe this would happen if I drove a hybrid Prius ;), ).
I do save some plastic bags and use them for garbage and for packing my lunch but paper bags can serve the same purpose and they all get thrown away eventually. And since it takes more plastic bags to bag the same amount of groceries than can fit into paper bags, I end up throwing many of the plastic bags away.
My mother used paper grocery bags for a lot of things before recycling was cool (we weren’t green back then – we were just poor) – she made book covers for my school books, used them for gift wrapping paper and used them to drain and absorb fat off of fried foods and for cooling cookies on. My mother also recycled my father’s old undershirts as dust and cleaning rags.
And one time I unknowingly ran over a plastic grocery bag and it got stuck to my exhaust system. I pulled over because I suddenly smelled a burning plastic smell so bad, I thought my car was on fire. I went to my mechanic and he found the bag had melted to the manifold and tail pipe. He pulled off as much as he could but I was stuck with that nauseating smell for weeks.
I also hate some of the plastic packaging that requires you to have heavy duty industrial scissors or a utility knife just to open.
Then again I’m old enough to remember as a kid when milk was delivered to our doorstep in glass bottles and we went to the butcher shop to buy our meats who wrapped meat in “butcher’s paper” so maybe I’m just getting old and cranky.
See post 74.
Oh geez, you just made me feel old and I’m 41. I still use rags to clean! We have a ‘rag bag’ (old pillowcase) in the laundry room closet, with holey towels or worn sheets, pajama bottoms etc. They’re dust rags, drop cloths, scrubbers, big-spill picker uppers, whatever. And they’re washed and reused over and over again.
The bigger towels and worn blankets get sent to the SPCA down the road since they always need them.
But then again, I think it’s my Yankee thriftiness handed down that makes me do these things. I have dyed curtains to use in other rooms (one set went through 3 reincarnations), freeze that spoonful of leftover veggies for soup, make soup from the turkey carcass and still use 48 cent Ajax to clean the bathroom. Probably what enabled us to buy a home and 3 acres when I was only 25.