Three things to do with plastic bags

1. Chuck them out
Allow them to moulder in landfill for a thousand years or, possibly, in the substantially plastic oceans, where they can choke sea birds and play havoc with marine animals.

2.Turn them into something useful
The great Etsylabs has a tutorial on how, using nothing more sophisticated than your domestic iron, you can fuse several flimsy bags into a sheet of tough plastic suitable for a range of uses, such as making the sturdier bag in this picture. (I'm hoping to use one as the lining for a pond in my garden.)

3. Turn them into something beautiful
Such as framed images made of recycled carrier bags, from the artist John Dahlsen, or recycled-bag mandalas from Virginia Fleck. Daryl Hannah, on her blog, devotes an entire film to meeting a wonderful Frenchman who braids bags and uses the cord he's made to create artworks including skulls and flags.

Comments

[Merlie]

Why not give excess bags back to Tesco. They take them back to recycle somehow. I never leave home without a plastic bag in my pocket. I still find most shops giving them out willy nilly. I'd have thought that even the corner shop should be doing more to save costs as well as the environment. I might undertake an action plan to stop my village from using them altogether - any other villages done a similar thing ? and how did it go and how?

[Ann Howard]

You can easily weld plastic bags together with a brief pass from a warm iron (causing minimal fumes), and then stitch them into whatever useful &/or decorative article you like.

[Tim Worstall]

"Allow them to moulder in landfill for a thousand years"

Excellent idea. It's called carbon sequestration. And the methane given off is collected to produce 33% of the UK's current renewable energy supplies.

[Craig Davies]

Sorry...didn't mean to rain on your parade...hope alls well

[Taavi]

J-P,
If you are planning to iron those plastic bags together for the good cause, have you considered the fumes coming from the plastic? And yes, Craig is right about the possible mishap with the end product...

[John-Paul Flintoff]

Hello Craig. You're absolutely right. It's a daft idea. I'll use something else, but may still make some crazy art stuff out of the old carrier bags...

[Craig Davies]

Hello J-P,

Are you really going to make pond lining out of old carrier bags? I'm just a tad sceptical as to whether it would even work. If you realised after going through the hassle of fusing them together, they leak and you have to go and buy some pond lining from a garden centre, will anyone be able to recycle the 'fused' product? Or would it be more environmentally friendly to just get the bags recycled in the first place?