Skeezix
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^ Currently, the situation is that people use retail shopping plastic bags to line their garbage bins. That's good because they're at least reusing the bag for a purpose other than their trip home with their shopping. The issue stands in that the garbage and the bags get thrown into dumps and remain in that state for 1000 years.
What should be happening is that garbage liners be all biodegradable. There are some brands of garbage liners like this already. It works for both the green bin and the regular trash. In both situations, the bag dissolves over a couple of weeks in contact with moisture. Whatever is biodegradable/compostable returns to nature, including the bag.
Regulating this is straightforward. Once we get people and the industry in the habit of not using plastic bags, the remaining holdouts will see the plastic bag eliminated by prohibiting their sale in the city (this should be province and countrywide, but let the city set the example and do its own thing for now). Having that ban on plastic bags, the next step is to ban plastic garbage liners and allow only the biodegradable kind... which the industry is voluntarily moving towards anyway.
Well said.
The problem is that there are a lot of "biodegradable" plastic bags on the market, only some of which are actually biodegradable. Some of the "biodegradable" bags are simply engineered to break down into tiny pieces of plastic (the word is oxo-biodegradable, IIRC), and therefore aren't all that much better than plain plastic bags. Some of the brands of "biodegradable" doggie "poop and scoop" bags are the worst offenders.
One needs to look for compostable bags, certified by the U.S. Composting Council. Interestingly, the truly compostable bags are usually no more expensive that the misleading "biodegradable" bags. BioBag, the brand shown in the photos above, is a good one (although it is shipped in from Norway, which arguably has its own environmental implications). There are other good brands -- the Region of Peel has a good list of brands on its site.