The Solid Waste District’s Alicia Ebaugh stands amidst the mountain of plastic bags collected.
The LaPorte County Solid Waste District collected a mountain of plastic bags that might have otherwise ended up in landfills or stuck in trees or fences during its recent bag recycling days. During the event held at Al’s supermarkets, citizens exchanged 17,897 plastic bags for reusable shopping bags.
“It was only the third year we’ve held the event, but response from residents has been fantastic,” said Alicia Ebaugh, the district’s education and public outreach coordinator. “We collected more than five times the amount of bags we received last year, and we got to replace those bags with 400 reusable ones. This is a win-win for everyone. By promoting reuse, we’re hoping fewer plastic bags will become litter in the environment and waste will be reduced.”
The bag swap was held to celebrate America Recycles Day, officially recognized on Nov. 15 each year.
SWD employees counted every single plastic bag collected, Ebaugh said, because it’s important for residents to know just how many of them are wasted each year. “Having nearly 18,000 bags sounds like a lot, but it’s probably only 1/20th of 1 percent of all the plastic bags used in LaPorte County each year,” she said.
It is estimated that 100 billion plastic bags are used in the United States each year, Ebaugh said. That figures out to about 313 per person, so a family of four might go through about 1,250 single-use plastic bags per year. The amount the SWD collected on these four days would have been used by about 57 residents over one year.
The bag swap was meant to encourage residents to bring reusable bags with them every time they shop, whether they are at the grocery store, a clothing store or elsewhere.
“No matter how good it is to recycle bags or anything else, it’s always better to think of ways to reuse them or not use them at all,” she said. “Obviously sometimes it’s more convenient to take the plastic bags at the store, and many of us already have ways to reuse plastic bags at home. But the sheer amount of plastic bags simply thrown out after one use in this country is astounding.”
Reusable bags are also a better option now that the district is no longer accepting plastic bags and films for recycling in its curbside program. Instead, those bags can be recycled at some stores including Kroger, Walmart and Meijer.
“The change was a matter of logistics,” she said. “This type of plastic is much harder to clean after it gets mixed in with the rest of the recyclables, so the companies that can recycle it stopped taking it from the sorting facility where all of our items go. They prefer the clean, dry bags and films be returned to a store for separate recycling. These bags are so light that they often blew out of the recycling trucks, anyway, which defeats the purpose and also places litter in fields, ditches and trees of LaPorte County.”
The district thanks all four Al’s Supermarkets in Michigan City and LaPorte, along with Republic Services and Waste Management, which donated the reusable bags given to residents. LaPorte Walmart provided recycling of all the plastic bags. “We couldn’t provide this service without their help,” Ebaugh said.
For more information on the district’s recycling programs, email Ebaugh at aebaugh@solidwastedistrict.com and visit www.solidwastedistrict.com.