I was glad to see them mention the use of grocery bags as bin liners in the article. I see some people dutifully use their cloth bags at the store and have always wondered what they do with their garbage at home. If there was a store with a large reduction of their consumption of plastic grocery bags I'd want to see what their sales of bin liner bas were over the same period. The cynic in me ponders whether the manufacturers of the boxes of bin liner bags aren't pushing for this type of legislation. If there are five billion plastic bags used in Aussie stores a year, they'd probably be overjoyed if their sales when up by just one billion bags.

Considering what you eat or just the compression of trash you wouldn't need 100% of the bags from the store to use as garbage bags, so bringing your own does make sense. But I've always thought the ill-conceived notion cities wanting to to force markets to charge high fees for the bags to force people to always bring their own crazy.

It would be equally crazy for someone to buy a load of groceries along with a box of Glad trash can liners, then take the whole mess home in their cute little hemp bag. Since it's almost guaranteed that those trash liner bags are headed for a landfill, shouldn't those carry the same fine as the grocery bags? Heck, since they'll only be used once ( for trash ) rather than twice ( groceries then garbage ) maybe they should carry a higher fine?

I reuse my bags, usually for garbage. The plastic is good for wet or greasy items, paper is good as it stands up on it's own. I don't ever buy small plastic bags for home trash use.

Biodegradable bags? Excellent idea. That's what I carry when walking the dog. I know "plastic bags" are bad, but I'm not going to carry a little shovel and container around down. At dog trials I see quite a few people re-use their plastic grocery bags for this same purpose.

No one should assume that 100% of the bags will be reused in another manner, but they should also not assume that 100% of the bags will just be tossed away.

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