Hear hear. And even then, plastic grocery bags are part of a beautiful, closed system of becoming trash bags. Now I have to go to the store, buy a literal roll of plastic bags, and carry it home in a non-plastic bag, then throw my garbage in this one-time-use garbage bag.

Congratulations! Progress has been made at you.

Do you have to use bags or do just do it because you've always done it?

We have similar recycling setup in Germany. I don't use bags for any of them.

We are not allowed to throw trash without bags for obvious reasons. I'm not sure I understand what you even mean by that.

What are the obvious reasons? Doesn't your trash go in a trash can?

Where do you empty your trash can?

Let’s say you throw away something sticky, maybe a dirty diaper, or something else. You don’t want to get that stuff on your own trash can, and the garbage collectors don’t want to deal with soiled garbage bins either. It is simply about sanity, residues and stuff attracts rodents and other pests.

Both in apartment buildings and in houses with trash collection, the rule is that you put the trash in bags.

All buildings have larger bins (between 240 and 1100 litres) on the outside or in a specified area. Those are picked up by the waste companies. There is no need to specifically place waste into a bag. You can just put it straight into the container.

We generally don't have all that much super sticky trash. We also simply clean our bins when needed. Our organic waste bin, for example is simply lined with an unbleached kitchen paper towel that gets dumped into the container as well.

Where I live, the large trash bin is collected by a small company that sends non standardized trucks. The workers open the bin and manually empty it, one bag at a time, by hand.

Not everyone lives in a big city. I'm not sure what I could put my garbage in to make their job easier other than some sort of bag. Find me a non-plastic bag that can fulfill this purpose and we'll have a reasonable solution. But since there is literally no other trash collection game in town, for now, the bags stay. I'll find other ways to reduce my plastic consumption, but I don't expect to fully eliminate it.

That sounds tedious.

Part of the solution to that is to standardize it. Even outside of cities, the bins are the same and can be picked up by the trucks automatically. The only manual part is rolling it to and from the truck.

Of course, generally usingess plastic is always the better option.

Just in case your request for a non-plastic bag was a real one, you can buy large strong paper bags for yard waste at home improvement stores.

I live rurally in the us, and don’t use trash bags at all. Our trash trucks pick up the bin and dump it into the truck rather than unloading in manually. I have noticed more roadside trash on trash days, because of unbagged trash.

The implementation of this was interesting in Switzerland. Because consumers had to pay a lot for waste, they started to remove packaging at the store and dumping it there for the store to deal with. Stores had the cost of removing packaging waste and put pressure on the supply chain. If customers start removing toothpaste tubes and cereal from cardboard boxes and dumping it the store's door, then the store has to deal with the overproduction of waste.

Take the habit of putting bags in your car, reuse them. It takes a while to have a system but now I have bags in my cars, a bag in my work backpack, etc.

I don't need any plastic or paper bag ever and additionally, my bags are much nicer and much more heavy duty...