I live in a condo at the NE corner of Dufferin+Steeles. We have a garbage bin on every floor, and garbage is supposed to be wrapped in a plastic bag. Up till now, I've been using the plastic bags that stores bag your purchases in.

Steeles is the boundary between Toronto and Vaughan. I'm in Vaughan, so the condo's garbage is still being collected :cool: The major shopping in the area consists of a strip-mall on the SE corner of Dufferin+Steeles, and a humoungous super-centre on the SW corner. SInce the south side of Steeles is Toronto, the stores there have to charge 5 ¢ per bag. I could pay for that. But "conserving finite resources" applies to my bank account, too :) Is there a source for plastic bags, suitable for garbage, at a lower cost than 5 ¢ each?

When our Loblaws started charging for bags I checked the prices on small garbage bags. The best price I saw was 10c a bag.

The good news is that the bags they are charging for are much sturdier than the old bags so you can put more garbage in them.

Get the white ones from Costco - they come on a roll in cardboard box. I can't remember what we paid for them but I think it was signficantly cheaper than 5 ¢/bag. In fact I would rather use them for shopping than use the grocery stores' bags.

Not trying to hijack your thread Walter, but are people using re-usable shopping bags now that the ban is in place (or before)? I had a conversation with some coworkers last week and I mentioned that we throw our bags into the laundry from time to time, especially if they have been used for meat/fish etc. I have speculated that the re-usable bags do get a bit dirty from regular usage.

cheers

It's a farce. People use shopping bags for garbage. Now instead of buying plastic shopping bags we are going to use reusable cloth bags and purchase garbage bags. I mean....

Interestingly, in our kitchen we have three waste containers (recycling, organic and garbage) that fit in a slide out drawer. Because of their size, so we have been buying bags for some time that fit the containers

We pay a few bucks for them but they fit the specialized containers perfectly and we change them relatively infrequently.

It is a cost but frankly the money we save by not buying Green Garbage bags (because of the new garbage bins) seems to offsets

Reminds me of a Lily Tomlin observation:

We buy a wastebasket and take it home in a plastic bag. Then we take the wastebasket out of the bag, and put the bag in the wastebasket.

When we get our main groceries, we use the plastic bins/bags as otherwise we would be charged $0.05 per bag. (Loblaws)

However, some of our groceries we get at Farm Boy who would give us $0.03 off. So instead, we just get the bags from there. With just 2 of us at home, we don't use that many garbage bags.

I'm not a big fan of the bins/bags. The bins can be washed out, but those bags are hard to clean. Juice from fresh meats and other items get all over the insides.

I am not too keen of reusable bags but when I can avoid using grocery bags I'll carry them to the car without any bags. I still use grocery bags for my home garbage and even if they were to ban them totally, I'd still have a suppy for years to come. Many people will simply throw them in the garbage when they have too many but I don't like doing this so I store them till required by self or family members.

Is there a source for plastic bags, suitable for garbage, at a lower cost than 5 ¢ each? When you think about it, .05 with the double use (carry both groceries and garbage) is pretty insignificant especially if you recycle.

Cheers!
TK