Recycle Rethink

I am a firm believer in recycling and trying to reduce land fill. There is a "but" involved here. The other day on the garbage room door. A notice stuck to it told us not to put plastic bags into the recycle bins. My reaction was 'What?". Being that businesses continue to hand out their products in plastic bags, we end up with a dearth of them. We used to put them into the recycle bins but now what do we do with them? I, faithfully, as most do, wash out bottles and squash tins, rinse wrap with food on it, separate this kind of thing from that and religiously follow the posted rules for garbage collection. There are three receptors under my sink and I play the sorting game every and all day. I used to put my plastic bags duly knotted into the recycle bin but that is no more. It was one thing to not be able to put beverage alcohol bottles into the bins even though they are glass albeit apparently not the same as the mayo bottles. I have to gear up my polluting car and take the wine bottles to a depot where in the smelly and dirty place I mingle with the guy who makes his living doing this. I wait in line while this chap puts through his weekly collection of hundreds of bottles and cans. Now, I am not complaining about this wonderful guy who helps us keep the streets clean, but I really do not want to spend time in this noisy and rather unpleasant place being the little old lady that I am. It was bad enough trying to find a parking spot to get in here not to mention the three or four miles worth of gas to do so. But that is another tale. Back to the plastic bags. Yes, I do take my cloth bags duly washed from time to time and duly forget them in the trunk of my car, but I try just as you do. But that doesn't mean I am free of the plastic situation. On line purchases come in plastic, other stores with large items, clothing stores and so on, use plastic bags. Are they biodegradable? And if not, why not? Then we could perhaps have them join up with the other stuff that seems to be unrecyclable to the experts. I went on line to find out why plastic bags are not to go into recycle bins and there were reasons, but there was no help with the question, okay what do I do with all of these bags other than use them as real garbage sacks. There are just too many of them. I know, I know those of you folks who have lots of time and commitment have no sympathy for crybabies like me but the news is that most people are me. We are kind of lazy and maybe not as easy to convince. The bottom line is, that if the powers that be, don't make this recycle movement easy enough for slobs like me, we just opt out. Advice is: make it simple enough and sensible enough, that all people will put forth an effort to recycle because if that doesn't happen, there will be cheating. I will do my part to change. Now the recyclers should do theirs. Give us a place to put ALL bottles and ALL plastic bags and for sure, you will get ALL cooperation and no sneaky petes. They'll busy doing what they can, I promise you - and more - to keep this planet going as long as we can.