What’s up with that? Clean plastic bags of all kinds are OK to recycle

We read with interest your recent article about the plastic grocery bags that we can leave at grocery store bins — and they then will be shipped away and recycled. We were wondering if we are also allowed to drop off in the same bins the plastic bags that our newspapers come in. We get two newspapers every day, and each newspaper is wrapped in two bags, which equals 28 plastic bags per week. We have a garage full of these bags and do not know what to do with them. Will the grocery stores take these plastic bags as well?

— Kerry Lange & C. Christensen-Lange

Hockinson

Great news, folks: You can empty our your garage and free up enough space for that gas guzzler you’ve always wanted!

Just kidding.

But seriously: The answer is yes. We called Melinda Merrill, Fred Meyer’s local spokeswoman, with your logical follow-up question — newspaper bags? bread bags? — and she gave plastic bags of all sorts the thumbs-up for recycling via those grocery store vestibule bins.

“Yes, you can put any kind of plastic bag in there,” she said. “The produce bags, the bulk bags, the bags from other retailers. Even if you buy a case of something at Costco — if you buy a big case of green beans — you can put the plastic from that case in there.”

Just make sure the plastic is clean, she said, and you’ll be doing due diligence.

“If it has food in it, it screws up the recycling stream,” she said. “If people can refrain from putting in something that still has an almond at the bottom of the bag, or peanut butter caked on it. That’s no good. If you’ve got a bag that had food in it, just make sure it’s super clean. That would be great.”

In case you missed it: Last week we responded to a reader’s skepticism regarding plastic bag recycling to local grocery stores (do they really recycle? or just collect and throw them away?) and found that grocers sell those used plastic bags to a company called Trex, which recycles them into faux-wood furniture like benches and decks. Trex says it recycles 1.3 billion bags annually. Fred Meyer recycled approximately 35 tons of plastic bags through Trex in 2008, Merrill said.

— Scott Hewitt

Got a question about your neighborhood? We’ll get it answered. Send “What’s up with that?” questions to neighbors@columbian.com.