[metroschultz]

You didn't pay attention,
I use the brown bags as fire starters for my fireplace.
I don't burn in the open. The city would fine me.
I live in the largest city in Virginia, by population and second largest by land mass. We have trash pickup on every Thursday and recycle pickup on every other Thursday.
When we moved into this home in Y2K, the garbage cans were NOT big enough to handle the volume of trash my family produced. I often put trash in my neighbors cans.
Now 8 years later the can is usually less than half full for regular trash and recycle sometimes only goes to the curb once a month.
I have a large green plastic tub in the garage for aluminum, and we have made it a game for my grandson to smash cans and fill it up. He comes over every Saturday so his mom can go to her second job. When the can is full he and I take it to the recyclers ourselves and spend the money on a movie or some other fun adventure.
Re-purposing products has accounted for most of the reduction. The rest is intelligent purchasing.
We truly attempt to buy only what we will use and try to find items with the least amount of useless packaging.

Getting back to the brown paper bags,
Two communities in Tidewater (The greater metropolitan area I live in) have banned the plastic t-shirt style bags from use in stores.
It seems they realized they were spending more in cleanup to get these things off the streets, and out of the water, and parks, etc
than they were recouping in taxes from the local supermarkets.
I have made the same suggestion to our city council. The recent elections replaced just about all of them so we will see what happens in the coming years.
Keep the ideas coming,
Schultz