I recently stopped using trash bags so that I am, officially, a plastic bag free household. Whatever can't be composted or recyled goes directly into my trash can's removeable hard plastic insert. I put a little of my cats litter (it's just ground up walnut shells) in the bottom to keep down the smell and absorb any rogue liquids.
It's gone considerably better than I anticipated so far. Has anyone else tried eliminating trash bags? If so, how has your experience been?
Where I live they discourage that. They also don’t want you to use paper bags. The reasons as far as I remember are that more waste will fly away when emptying the dumpster and nastier dumpsters causing worse working conditions for the person driving the truck. The third reason (doesn’t apply to me personally) is sorting based on bag color.
That’s a fair point. I’ll have to reach out to the sanitation company and find out if they have any specific concerns. If they do, hopefully we’ll be able to address them
Where I live they also don’t encourage loose garbage or even garbage in loosely tied or untied bags. The reason here is that uncontained garbage subjected to a brisk wind, which we have plenty of, becomes litter. And no one wants to award themselves a ZeroWaste badge when they are directly contributing to landscape litter.
We haven’t used bin liners in years, it was really a pretty easy thing to stop. We try not to put liquids in, and in general don’t have any issue with smell. But the bins are plastic, if they smell we just wash them.
My solution doesn’t appear to apply to you, since you’re practically plastic free, but for others reading, i use my milk cartons and bread bags (where the sandwich bread is packaged) as plastic bags. I clean out the milk cartons with water and let them air dry. They don’t smell, and I’m not using additional plastic for trash.
They make these corn based compostable trash bags that might be another alternative worth considering.
What do you do with it once it gets full?
I take it and dump it in the dumpster for my apartment building. The nice thing is that when you take the trash bag out of the equation, you can take it out as often as you want. If something extra smelly finds its way inside, there’s no hesitation to go dump it rather than holding out until you fill the bin
That’s convenient. I could probably get away with that in an apartment but if I got caught I’d be in trouble. All trash needs to be in bags in my city.
Yeah no, my can is way too heavy for that.
And no I’m not going to replace it and create more waste.
