Recycling Plastic Bags and Other Similiar Material

Last summer I wrote about and I believe that it's important that we make an effort to use them.  However, there are always times that we end up with a plastic bag for one reason or another.  In Medford, we .  So what should you do with those plastic bags?  Hopefully you only end up with a small enough bunch that you find you have uses for just about all of them.   However, try as we might, we still end up with a variety of things made from materials similar to plastic bags  - wrappers on paper towels, packing material in boxes, bags that held parts of kids toys, I'm sure that try as you might, some of these end up in your home.

I was very excited recently to read a post by Random Charlotte about a way to recycle these materials!  She links to the website Plastic Bag Recycling  that collects information about many places that take plastic bags and links to them.  At first I thought it was one universal program, but I realized that each place has its own recycling program. 

Typically you can put the following CLEAN  and DRY bags into their receptcals:

• Grocery bags
• Retail bags (hard plastic and string handles removed)
• Paper towel and toilet paper plastic wrap
• Plastic newspaper bags
• Plastic dry cleaning bags
• All clean, clear bags labeled with a #2 or #4

They have one big warning about what to NEVER include. The following are considered contaminants and could jeopardize recycling programs.

Do NOT include the following.

• NO food or cling wrap
• NO prepackaged food bags including frozen food bags (e.g., pre-washed salad bags)
• NO film that has been painted or has excessive glue
• NO other bags or films
• NO bio-based or compostable plastic bags

I started looking up some of the big retailers in Medford that are listed on their site for what their programs are.

Stop & Shop

We accept #02 and #04 plastic shopping bags, dry cleaning bags and newspaper bags. We send them, plus all of our shrink wrap from stores, to our plastics recycling company AERT (Advanced Environmental Recycling Technologies Inc.). The plastic becomes composite decking (ChoiceDek at Lowe's). We have collected millions of pounds of bags for recycling.

This is great, and indicates that you can also put in wrappers from around packages of toiletpaper & paper towels as well. 

Other grocery stores in our area that have plastic bag recycling containers include: Shaw's, Whole Foods, Foodmaster and Market Basket.  You might be surprised to find these recycling containers at other kinds of stores as well, including: Staples, Lowes and JC Penny. 

We all know that it's better to reuse bags and there are many uses for them, but if you can't reuse them, make an effort to recycle them!

Happy Greening!
Alicia

This post is re-posted from my blog Green Lifestyle Consulting.  Read more about recycling, reusable bags, and our solar panels directly on the blog.