Bag for life anyone?

So, I was in the co-op, with a loaded trolley, and I realised that I had left my stack of "bags for life" in the car. I felt like a dork, I am always doing that. The habit of getting out of the car and wandering into the supermarket with nothing but the money to pay is too strong.

By the way, if you don't know, a bag for life is a strong plastic bag that generally costs about 10p, and which is is designed to be reused. If the bag wears out, you can return it to the store where you got it, and it will be replaced.

Anyway, when the dorky feeling passed, I realised that I was relieved. The bags for life are not as easy to pack as the free bags, being taller than they are wide. When I use my bags for life it always takes me longer to pack my bags, and means I am holding up the check out, slowing other shoppers down. And they don't sit so well in the car - I have to be very careful how I place them or they tend to topple over, spilling my shopping everywhere.

And anyway, I had very few of the free bags at home, and I reuse them to line my waste paper bins, so I needed more. I could buy bin liners I suppose, but not only would that cost me, when the free bags are, well, free, but the free bags from the co-op are supposed to degrade within months. I am not sure that any bin liners I could buy would be as "green".

Talking of green, I am not sure how green the bags for life are. The plastic is quite thick. I have had to take one back to the shop for a replacement when some plastic packaging sliced through the bottom, and I do not know what happened to the bag after that. Does the shop recycle it, or is it binned?

And although it is very satisfying to pull out a stack of bags for life, and have my green credentials out on display as it were, it is just as satisfying to shove a pile of plastic carriers into the recycle bins that almost every supermarket has now. Though can a degradable plastic bag be recycled? Perhaps I shouldn't be trying to recycle them, perhaps I should be allowing them to degrade - but how do I do that? If I throw the bag into my domestic waste, surely the bag is incinerated before it has a chance to degrade. I could chuck the bag in in the road and leave it to rot down, except that would be littering. Or would the degradable plastic bags rot better if I they were mixed in with the compost made locally? I don't know, and it's unlikely to happen even if that did turn out the be the best way of dealing with the things.

Maybe I should buy one of the hessian re-usable bags, as they are natural fibres, which would eventually degrade (if left to), and even if burnt would not cause the chemical smoke that plastic does. But we do not grow hessian in Jersey, so the bag would have to be shipped in. And I guess that bags like that are probably made in China or Taiwan and so are shipped quite far - I have heard that boats produce more carbon that airplanes - so using a hessian bag might not be as green as it seems. And I suspect that the hessian handles are quite uncomfortable when the bag is full.

Of course the plastic bags might be transported just as far.

And then there is the fundraising question. If I reuse a bag I get a penny back from the co-op to donate to the Hospice. So using the bags for life gives me a double whammy; some satisfied-with-myself-for-being-green feeling with an added soupcon of giving-to-charity glow. And don't underestimate how important those minute stirrings of pleasure are - shopping is a pretty depressing experience, likely to get worse as GST and 20-means-20 start to bite.

I saw a woman clearly as confused as me, who had decided to cut through the issue by walking her shopping home in the trolley. She was having a mighty struggle trying to get onto a pavement - it did not look like fun. Besides, I think the co-op might not support people walking out with their trolleys.

So, have I come to a conclusion? Not really. I shall probably walk the middle ground - reuse my bags for life one week, and use the degradable bags the next.