About Recycling Plastic Bags

Making an Informed Choice

Recently, the long standing question that grocers and retailers routinely have asked to satisfy the bagging preferences of their customers has taken on a new dimension. No longer is either the question or its answer a simple matter of options, preferences or priorities. The question now embodies decisions for both the retailer and the consumer about whether plastic bags, paper bags, cardboard boxes or reusable bags - often made from other recycled plastic materials - should be available or used. And, as it seems to be increasingly the case, the answers are neither simple nor obvious. Colorado Recycles has created this web site and the information contained in it to help retailers and consumers make informed choices about which option or choice makes the most sense.

In order for retailers and consumers to make rational and informed choices, they must have reliable and factual information at their disposal. Too often readily available information found on the Internet and put forward by advocacy groups with a particular bias or agenda is not reliable, and is frequently distorted or manipulated to lead the reader to a predetermined conclusion. The information that is contained on this web site has been carefully assembled to be balanced and factual so that the reader can rely on it with confidence. One of the founding principles of Colorado Recycles when it was incorporated more than twenty five years ago was that individuals who are given objective and balanced information will make rational and informed choices and those choices will become ingrained behaviors that guide them in their day-to-day lives.

Colorado Recycles was founded on the basic economic reality that recycling can be an important source of quasi-raw material for the manufacture of products useful for human living and the enhancement of the quality of life. Reuse of materials and products is important, as is the threshold decision about what materials and products to acquire. But sooner or later, the materials which have been reused reach the end of their productive life and must be disposed of. Sooner or later those materials will end up in the municipal solid waste stream and how we as a society deal with the municipal solid wastes that we generate is largely in our own hands and under our own policies.

Recycling is an important strategy in the proper management of the solid waste generated as a byproduct of human existence; but it is not the only strategy. The very simple premise inherent in all of Colorado Recycles efforts is that if the product or material has value, every rational effort should be made to divert that material or product from the municipal solid waste stream and into the creation of new products. But not everything can be recycled, and sometimes materials that have the potential for future recycling must wait until technology and markets can accommodate them.

There are two other important strategies for addressing our solid wastes that cannot be recycled and they are landfilling and incineration. Incineration is not used much in the western United States, although there are some products such as waste tires that lend themselves to being used for fuel. Landfilling is often a very appropriate strategy, and Colorado Recycles holds to the belief that a society should always be reviewing what products and materials are being deposited in landfills and how they might be better addressed. Recycling is a production process, and recycling efforts must be evaluated for their energy use and other potential environmental impacts just as other manufacturing and production processes must be evaluated.

Elsewhere on this web site is a link to the city-by-city guide to plastic bag resources that was assembled for the convenience of the public. That guide will be continually updated to reflect new recycling resources as they become known. The research clearly demonstrated that the citizens of Colorado have immediately available and convenient recycling options currently. A statistical snapshot of the recycling options showed that there are multiple recycling resources serving more than 67% of Colorado citizens. That percentage is probably much higher but we did not include numbers for the analysis unless there was a documented recycling resource available within the corporate limits of a community. Many of Colorado's smaller and rural communities are not served by major retail facilities, although those citizens shop in adjacent communities. As part of the research, Colorado Recycles did not extrapolate based on assumed shopping habits. Thus, the 67% is a very, very conservative estimate.

A second very encouraging finding from the research was that plastic bag recycling is very, very easy to establish and use. For the consumer, the recycling resources are all located in the most convenient locations to their normal and everyday life styles. For the retailer or other entity that desires to support plastic bag recycling, the drop off containers are unobtrusive and require only the most minimal of resources. Plastic bags by their nature are light and compact easily making collection and shipping to a remanufacturer very easy. In fact, a plastic bag recycling drop off container can be set up in any office, any governmental facility like a courthouse or city hall, any church, any retail store or anywhere the public frequents.

Colorado Recycles has prepared several discussion papers based on the research conducted as this web site was formulated. The following links can be used to access those discussion topics. These discussions will be updated as new and more definitive information becomes available:

Paper or Plastic: Which is the Wise Choice?

Bag Bans: Solid Public Policy or Policy Failure?

Plastic Identification Chart: What Do Those Numbers Mean?