A Green Garbage Bag

Thursday is trash day. Despite the cliche, taking out the trash is neither my husband nor my children’s job–it’s mine. Since I’m going out of town before trash day, I’m doing my usually night-before-trash-day run around the house, whereby I empty all of the trash cans and replace the bags with clean, empty ones. In places like the bathroom and bedrooms, I recycle (or rather reuse) leftover plastic grocery bags as garbage bags, but in the kitchen, I need the heavy-duty, real-thing–your basic black garbage bag.

I must admit that every time I pull out a full trash bag from the kitchen trash can, I get a sinking feeling in my stomach–knowing that this bag and its contents are going to end up in a landfill where they’re going to just sit there. At least when I dump stuff in the compost pile, I know that it’s breaking down into soil. And the cans and bottles I put in recycling, well I know that they’ll most likely be turned into something else. But trash? Yeah, it will probably outlive the cockroaches after a nuclear war.

Doomsday scenarios aside this is why I was so glad that I’d just had a box of the new Perf Go Green biodegradable garbage bags sent to me, which I can use to reline my kitchen trash can. Not only are these bags made from recycled plastic, but they are also coated with a secret formula that turns this recycled plastic into biodegradable plastic. As the press materials for these bags explain, “When discarded in soil and exposed to the presence of microorganisms, moisture and oxygen, Perf Go Green products biodegrade, decomposing into simple materials found in nature.” Most plastic bags take about 100 years to break down; these bags are supposed to break down in 24 months in landfills.

I’m not so greenwashed by a free box of garbage bags to believe that they are the solution to the world’s garbage problems. I mean, these bags need optimal landfill conditions to break down, and who is to say that those conditions will exist? However, they are a good start.

In the meantime if we all followed the 3 Rs of reduce, reuse and recycle a little more closely, we would all have a lot less trash to put out on garbage day. But since everyone’s going to have some garbage to put out at some point, I know that in the future I’ll have less of a sinking feeling in my stomach when I put the garbage out in one of these new bags. At least there’s a chance that these bags will biodegrade in my lifetime, unlike traditional trash bags.