Elbow Grease - the Biodegradeable Alternative to Plastic Bags for Kitchen Garbage and Wastebasket Liners

I ran into my friend Julie while ferrying up the Lynn Canal between Juneau and Haines yesterday. Julie has successfully eliminated plastic grocery bags from her life. But that has created a new problem - with what do we now line our kitchen garbage containers, our waste baskets? The question only reveals how deeply plastic has become embedded in our lives. Check it out:

Plastic is over-running our planet. Estimates run as high as one million pieces of plastic per square kilometer (0.6 mile) floating in specific areas of the the Pacific Ocean. In this area, plastics outnumber plankton, the base of the marine food web. A surface trawl of the ocean found 6 pounds of plastic pieces for every pound of zoo plankton. Don't Think of a Plastic Bag!

I am old enough to remember NOT having plastic bags to line every little container. I actually remember being allocated the chore of scrubbing out metal waste baskets! That got me to thinking...did we always put our garbage into 30-gallon plastic bags and THEN put it in the garbage pail or did garbage just get dumped unceremoniously from the little to the bigger container? Well, ubiquitous plastic bags must be relatively new on the scene because I remember very well - and I'm not all that old - unbagged, sometimes overflowing, and yes - metal garbage cans. Maybe we can resurrect those old practices.

So, I telephoned one of our local sanitation companies (Community Waste Solutions) and happily learned that it is not necessary to bag garbage at all! Probably, a lot of you already knew that. But I've been lugging plastic bags full of trash to the dump or dump station for years. No longer. I can either haul my garbage can and dump it's unbagged contents into the dumpster, or I can reuse that 30-gallon plastic bag by opening it up and depositing the contents less the bag. I save money and maybe I can help improve the ratio of zoo plankton to plastic in the Pacific.

For those of us who are just desperate for eco friendly waste basket or kitchen garbage liners, check out Biodegradable Cornstarch Sacks the next time you are in the UK. Apparently this product is not yet available in the US.