Thrift Week 2026, Day 7: How to Recycle Plastic Bags

I'm going to wrap up this Thrift Week series with a type of waste that's particularly ubiquitous: plastic bags. Actually, here in New Jersey, they're a lot less ubiquitous than they used to be, as the state banned single-use plastic shopping bags in 2022. Now, when we go to the grocery store, we no longer need to rush to bag up our own groceries before the checker starts tossing them into a disposable bag. But plastic bags still make themselves into our home in other ways. The grocery fliers delivered weekly to our door come in a little plastic sleeve, and we occasionally have to grab disposable produce bags (which are still legal) at the grocery store. (We always have at least one reusable shopping bag with us, but if we make an impromptu stop at the store, we might not have our mesh produce bags.) We also end up with small plastic bags that once held foodstuffs like dry beans and popcorn. And occasionally something we've ordered comes in a box with a plastic liner.

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to put these leftover bags to good use:

• We keep several of them in our shopping bag in case we run out of mesh produce bags. They're also useful for packing up foodstuffs from bulk bins on the rare occasions we visit a store that has any. 
• We save the little plastic sleeves that come with the grocery fliers and pass them on to my parents, who say they make ideal poop bags for walking the dogs. They're actually better than store-bought bags sold for this purpose because they're longer, so one bag can hold multiple poops.
• I often use larger bags to hold items I'm leaving out for a Freecycle porch pickup. The bag protects the item from the weather and gives the recipient a convenient way to carry it. And using a bag marked "Freecycle" eliminates any chance that a passerby will assume an item is simply being thrown away and try to grab it.
• Back in the days before the bag ban, we used to save plastic shopping bags to line our wastebaskets. But since we almost never accepted plastic bags, we usually didn't have enough for all the wastebaskets in the house, and we discovered that most of the time, we didn't really need them. The kitchen trash can is the only place we ever throw away anything wet or messy, and we still use store-bought bags for that.

But these flimsy little bags can't be used indefinitely. Eventually they develop holes, and then they have to be discarded. Our local supermarket used to have a bin where we could drop them off to be recycled, but it hasn't been there for years. So most of the time, damaged bags—along with other types of plastic packaging, like the envelopes that packages come in—just end up in the trash.

However, according to Earth911, that isn't the only option. Based on a quick search, it looks like there are many big-box stores in our area that collect both #2 and #4 plastic bags for recycling, including Target, Walmart, Sam's Club, and Kohl's. So we could simply stash all those unwanted plastic bags in the car and drop them in one of those store's bins the next time we're in the area, were it not for one snag: most of them don't have any sort of label on them to indicate which type of plastic they are. Right now, we have eight plastic bags that are no longer fit for service, and only one of them is labeled as #2 plastic. The rest are anybody's guess. 

 

Now, according to the websites for Target and Walmart, these stores accept all kinds of "plastic bags and films," not just specific numbers. So, in theory, we could just dump all our unwanted bags into one of their bins and let them try to sort them out. Maybe a lot of them would end up in the landfill anyway, but at least we'd be giving them every chance at getting recycled first. I guess it's worth a shot.