Recycle Plastic Bag

Kroger says plastic bag recycling up 180 percent

CINCINNATI (June 22, 12:15 p.m. ET) -- Kroger Co. recycled more than 1.2 billion pounds of corrugated cardboard and paper last year, according to the company’s fifth sustainability report.

In addition, Cincinnati-based Kroger and its customers recycled 26 million pounds of plastic -- an 180 percent increase in plastic recycling since 2007.

Kroger’s improved bagging techniques and increased use of reusable bags saved an additional 159 million plastic bags, the report said, with the goal of sparing 1 billion bags by 2014.

The company also sold and provided customers with more than 5 million reusable bags, which is an average of 14,000 per day. Kroger said it expects to sell another 5 million reusable bags this year.

Since 2009, the company’s manufacturing plants have reduced the amount of waste sent to landfills by 30 percent -- a 22 million pound reduction. Kroger manufacturing has also set a 2011 goal of reducing the amount of waste sent to landfills by 60 percent, using 2009 as a baseline.

This is fantastic news, although not surprising.

Plastic bag makers have worked for years to encourage greater recycling of plastic bags and product wraps, grow recycling infrastructure and educate consumers. Kroger’s success proves that when education meets opportunity, more of us choose to do the right thing!

Plastic bag recycling is an effective solution for keeping bags out of the waste stream and the natural environment.

It’s also great to hear that more consumers are embracing an overall “reduce, reuse, recycle” approach and are using reusable bags when it makes sense to do so. We look forward to seeing more stories like this.

Shari Jackson

Director, Progressive Bag Affiliates

American Chemistry Council Local community recycling coordinators like me are interested in helping capture more plastic film at our drop-off sites. But it's a tricky material that calls for a well designed, self-compacting container to be used. We have very large (40-yard) compacting units for collecting cardboard; it would be nice to find comparable (but slightly smaller) equipment to use for plastic film. Anybody know of something that would work for this application?

{Thoughts on Shops} – Juani1 – Crocheting Plastic Bags & More ...

Her amazing  La Bolsa Chica includes some adorable crocheted fish and an octopus (recycled from plastic bags!), crocheted plastic shopping bags (recycled from plastic bags!) and some beautiful crocheted wearables.

Her banner is fun and adorable – I love that she has worked in a clear photo of her most popular item. I do think the banner should have her shop name Juani1 (or the shop should have the banner name if that is the business name)- it might be confusing for customers and hard for them to ever find us again if we use multiple names on our shop home page. I love her banner tagline – Your Trash is my Art, although if Juanita will be adding more crocheted wearables she may need to rethink this. Her shop title ( super important for SEO – you can often rank very high on a Google search with the right words here

I think she can definitely make the crochet wearables work with the recycled crochet trash bags, but the visuals need to be more consistent and appealing. Before we talk about the visuals though, let’s take a look at the actual makings.