By now, you may have successfully rid yourself of plastic grocery bags because you are diligently carrying your reusable bags to the stores. Yet, you still end up with plastic bags. Don’t throw them out immediately. You can always find a second use for them before they hit the landfill.

 

Bread bags, cereal box bags, frozen vegetable bags, newspaper bags, plastic wrappers from magazines and birthday party goody bags… these are just a few of the plastic bags that end up in a big stoneware pitcher I keep full of bags in my kitchen. Then I can reuse them for things like:

 

 

 

 

Throwing out bones. When I’ve got bones from a chicken, I wrap them in one of these bags before taking them out to the garbage. Hint: In the warm months, you really don’t want chicken bones or any other animal products hanging out in your garbage cans for too long. They can start to smell and attract critters. If there are several days before trash collection, wrap the remains in the plastic bags and stick them in the freezer until trash day. Then throw them in the trash on pick-up day, and they’ll probably still be half frozen by the time they are hauled away. No smell. No critters.