At work we have a service where we accept shopping bags for recycling. The things are light as a feather and the deposit box fills so damn quick and yet only weighs about 5kg.

Another service we used to do was an exchange (actually we do this about every 2 years) where people bring in 20 plastic shopping bags for recycling and we hand over a 'reusable' one. I put emphasis of reusable considering that there are ways of reusing plastic bags.

What makes me scratch my head is that plastic bags, generally speaking are new, people used to use things like woven bags, so now we are looking at going back to that. That and the fact we hand these reusable bags out time and time again with people jumping at the chance of a freebie and yet we still have bags in shops!

Anyhow I'm curious to know what you think of plastic shopping bags, how many you get through roughly a week and how you dispose of them.

What do you think a potential solution is?

The current situation is a mess. You have radicals saying to put taxes on them on one hand whilst there are other plastic items worse than your plastic bags that aren't even on the radar.

Personally I refuse a bag whenever I can or take a reusable if I'm doing a lot of shopping.

I have some images of the plastic bags I've collected at work, I'll try to post them in the next few days.

I use them to clean dog poop and the litter box.

Oprah calls them 'poop bags.'

Not that I watch oprah.