@Lara Moss, those are wonderful items which I believe are made of used plastic bags. Am I correct on that? We have one senator here named Cynthia Villar who has established a handicraft industry for idle housewives. One project is in weaving bags and other items made of dried water lily. The products in your picture are almost the same as the items produced by the handicraft workers of the senator. I have no aptitude in arts so all I can contribute is the folding of plastic grocery bags.
Many people have started making sleeping mats for homeless people from the used plastic bags. They do it similarly to the way that I make the little throw rugs, except that I use a strand of yarn to add color to the rugs, and the mats are just made from the plain old bags. Mostly, we do not have much choice of colors from the grocery stores. They seem to think that plain brown is a good color, probably because it resembles the color of the old paper bags. Other than that, we get some white ones, and yellow from the Dollar Stores. I don't know where the pretty colored bags come from; but it must be from higher quality boutique shops or something similar. The little flowers are really pretty, @Lara Moss , and I could actually make those to look like daisies with the white and yellow bags. I will have to look for the instructions on making flowers. Besides the throw rugs, I have made slippers, and little can-cozies, to keep my ice water cold.
This is EXACTLY what I do as well. I am glad that stores are willing to take these for recycle. It makes me feel guilt-free when I use them at the store because really, they are just on loan. When I am done with them, I give them right back to the store.
Ken, are you saying the paper bag itself can go into the compost pile and not just what is in it? If so, that is very interesting. I'll have to give it a try.
I have large compost piles, and not a compost bin. With a compost bin, you might want to shred any paper you put in there, With a pile, I include whole boxes, and even boxes inside of boxes, filled with compostable materials. The first year that I composted, I shredded all of the paper and cardboard that I included, thinking that it would compost more quickly that way. What I found, however, was that it clumped together and took a lot longer to compost. My piles are large, and difficult to turn over, so I use a combination of heat composting (in the center) and vermi-composting (along the edges), and the paper bags, complete boxes, paper towel rolls and the like create air pockets within the pile, which aids greatly in composting. Now, I still shred much of the paper and cardboard that I add, but I also include several boxes and yes, I just place the paper bags full of compostables on the top of the pile. Within three years, except for the bits of plastic tape and other non-compostables that might accidentally find their way into my compost bins, it's all compost and I can't tell one thing from another. My compost is just crawling with earthworms too. There were plenty of earthworms that just found their own way into my compost but this year, for the first time, I bought about a thousand earthworms to hurry things along, with an impressive effect. I have been adding stuff to my compost pile all spring, summer and fall, yet it's at about the same level as it was once the snow and ice melted this spring. I'm sorry, I don't want to derail this thread, which is about plastic bags, so you can learn more about my composting in this thread, and make any compost-related replies to it there. On the topic of the thread, plastic grocery bags are a whole lot easier for me to carry into the house, since I'm one of those guys who likes to carry them all in one trip. However, there are so many of them, since they like to place only a few items per bag, that I can't possibly use them all, and no one around here recycles plastic bags. I'd probably have to drive three hundred miles to find a plastic recycling place. I'm not a huge environmentalist, yet it seems a waste to pack that many little plastic bags into the trash that I then have to transport to the transfer station, and I'm not really into making plastic flowers and such, so I usually have them place the frozen and cold stuff in their plastic grocery bags, but everything else in paper bags. I have a trash can downstairs that isn't used for much of anything but empty cat food cans, and since I only give them a couple of cans per day, it takes a while to fill that bag, and it really stinks by the time it's full enough to justify taking it to the transfer station. So I do use plastic bags to place the cans in before putting them into the larger plastic bag inside of the trash can. My wife got mad at me for using Cling wrap for that purpose.
We have the worst and cheapest plastic grocery bags. I can not imagine that they would last through a dryer cycle because the seldom last from the trunk to the door. I have to make sure if I have cans that I tell them to use paper, otherwise something might rip loose and land on my foot!. As far as the left over bags go, I do re-use and recycle. I do the same thing as many of the others I push them all in one bag and then take them back to the store next trip. Better plastic bags or the much bigger ones I will use for garbage or to carry items. I like the heavier types of bags you get from the malls or boutique style stores, they last for awhile and I tend to use those to carry items like my lunch, books... things like that. Now I do have some of those heavier recycled grocery bags that you can take with you when you shop, and I like them, I use those often. I have put them in the wash and never have any problems, it is true they do get soft with time. Are those the bags you are using for the rugs? I could see that would work very well. I would be concerned with some of the dyes in some of the colored ones, but the more natural ones should be fine for craft and yarn projects. The stores here have all sorts of designs in many colors, the newest ones are Star Wars and Frozen. Not that long ago we had some Disney ones. I got a bunch of freebies when the Farms Produce market opened, I have been using those a few years now.
My first experience dealing with plastic bags came in the 1980s when I setup a small apartment inside my parents's home and I began to take care of my own expenses, what brought in may bags I used to stack in a container similar to this; Not rocket science really, just putting the bag into and pushing down until there was no more space for bags, so I began to fold the bags sometime in the 90s, making them small square packets to put into a kitchen's drawer. However folding bags carefully takes time, so I'm actually putting those bags into a soap container like this after rolling them this way:
Walmart and Kroger both have large bins for recycling bags. Even when I cut up the plastic grocery bags and make yarn out of them, I still have ends and pieces left over;so I have a special wastebasket that I put the leftover plastic in. When I find a bag that has been ripped out, I can't cut it up properly to use as yarn; so I use that bag to store all of the leftover plastic from the bags that I did cut up. When they recycle the bags, they melt the plastic and make new bags anyway; so it does not matter that mine are shredded up into pieces. This saves even those parts of the bag from going into a landfill and laying there forever. It is strange how something that shreds apart so easy when you are carrying groceries in it can last for such a long time in the ground, and even when it is used as yarn to make rugs and slippers, it lasts a long time.
Here in California depending on wear you live you have to pay for a bag, wether it's plastic or paper. Even stores like Loft, etc ask if you want to buy a bag. I save some of my plastic bags, use them for different things around the house or for shoes when I pack. I have an old vacuum cleaner that I never use next to the fridge in the garage. I just loop one handle of the bah over the handle of the vacuum cleaner...it holds quite a lot and they're not all wrinkled up.
Paying for plastic bags became a supposed law in this city some years back. It was aimed to discourage the use of non-recyclable materials in favor or paper bags, carton boxes and so on. However this city characterizes for last-living laws, projects or initiatives, not because they are over, taken down or reversed, but that once in effect, the pass of the time sends them to the land of the forgotten and nobody pays attention ever to them.
What great tips here people! The plastic flowers are done the same way when I use to make flowers from colored tissue paper.. many , many years ago... but I now want to try the flowers with recylcled white bags and just need to get me some pink straws.. thank you all so much for the ideas on this home improvement thread. I enjoyed all the ideas, videos and info that were given here !! I will be checking in here more often from now on.. ..
That's a beautiful rug, @Yvonne Smith. I like the idea of adding a strand of yarn with the bags, I've never seen that done before. I stuff all of the bags into one of the reusable grocery bags, the kind you use for frozen goods, because it's more sturdy. It just hangs in the kitchen, on the knob of the pantry door. I use those bags to scoop the dirty kitty litter into, then put them in a big plastic litter container outside, sort of like a diaper pail. It's nice not to have the odor inside, and the litter diaper pails are out of my budget, especially since it's recommended that people put one by each litter box. I have way too many litter boxes and way too little space to do that.