Kudos to City of Katy for Recycling!

Here's news that will make my friend Karen K very happy-- the City of Katy has started recycling!  I know change is hard, and some of the people in Katy will complain, but recycling is so important.  The more we implement Reduce/Reuse/Recycle, the less our children will have to clean up from landfills in the future.  Kudos!!

I've been a recycler for many years, and feel better about using a product if the container it comes in is recyclable.  In looking up info about recycling, I realized I MUST get with the program as far as using shopping bags, though.  This is from the Clean Air Council:
Every year, Americans use approximately 1 billion shopping bags, creating 300,000 tons of landfill waste.⁶
Plastic bags do not biodegrade. Light breaks them down into smaller and smaller particles that contaminate the soil and water and are expensive and difficult to remove.⁶
Less than 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled each year. Recycling one ton of plastic bags costs $4,000. The recycled product can be sold for $32.⁶
When the small particles from photodegraded plastic bags get into the water, they are ingested by filter feeding marine animals. Biotoxins like PCBs that are in the particles are then passed up the food chain, including up to humans.[7]

While I find the last sentence motivating in a gross-out sort of way, I'm staggered by the cost outlined in the penultimate one.  If it costs $4000 to recycle a ton of bags, but only $32 of that cost can be recouped, a different solution has to be found.  Switching to paper is not the solution; Paper takes more water and energy to produce than plastic and since paper is heaver, the environmental impact is greater to truck paper bags from the manufacturing facility to a warehouse and then to a store.  So, I am going to develop the habit of carrying reusable shopping bags.

I confess, it could be easier:  In Rochester, NY, I visited a Wegman's grocery, and they really have it figured out.  Their bags are a reasonable size (some of the ones I've seen here weigh 25 lbs. when loaded), they have little loops under the handles so they fit on a standard-sized rack that holds them open while being loaded at the store, they have a plastic liner in the bottom so the bag holds its shape even when filled with oddly shaped items, and when I stand up and carry them, the handles are short enough that the bags don't drag on the ground.  Also (and perhaps most importantly), they train their baggers so you don't wind up with one bag full of all the heavy stuff.  

Next thing someone smarter than me needs to figure out is how to get rid of the little plastic bags to collect your apples and hold them as you check out.  When I was a kid, there were paper bags.  That's not a solution, but maybe someone else has modern idea?