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The next time you bake potatoes slather them with bacon grease first...
At our local co-op, they take returns of egg cartons, but only the pressed-pulp ones.
Plastic bread bags are used as liners for winter boots. Put one over each foot, secure the top with a rubber band, and then put your boots on. Keeps your feet dry, in theory.
Bread bags are also good for getting your boots on if they're a little tight. Put your foot in the bag, then slide your foot into your boot. It'll slide down nice and easy. Then pull the bag off your foot and out the boot. One time use, but effective.
That potato jam sounds really interesting.grandparents kept a mason jar of drippings for frying / potroasts they were poor farmers who never wasted, potato peels also were used for making a semi sweet jam which was just 1/2 cup of sugar 2-4 cups milk, your potato peels, and 2 hours of stirring on low heat and skimming the foam off to make a jam jar portian of milk jam. from what i have read it's what grocers sell as dulce de leche
I like to use plastic bags to line small garbage cans at home. A couple of major cities in my area have bans on plastic bags at retail stores. You can imagine how practical it is to walk down the street with a paper bag full of stuff and have the bag get soaked and fall apart during the 11 months out of the year when it rains here.
"There are eight million stories in the naked city..."New York City tried to pass the same law and - THANKFULLY - it got shot down by the state legislature. For all the reasons mentioned in this thread - like yours about reliability in bad weather to others who, like us, reuse them for, at minimum, garbage bags, getting rid of them will just make our life more complicated and expensive.
We'd have to figure out how to get groceries home (we don't always know we're going to a store when we're out so carrying a bag to the store is not practical and, as you note, paper has its limitations especially in a walking city like NYC) and we'd end up just buying plastic bags to use for garbage so no save for the environment anyway.
NYC's legislature debated and worked on this bill for years - my God, are there no other more-pressing needs in this city of 10 or so million that seems to have, IMHO, some real problems that our elected officials have the time to spend years debating and writing laws about plastic bag use.
I don't have any idea what all of it goes for, but some is used as fuel for diesel engines. It generally smells strongly of french fries when you run onto one fueled in this way.Used cooking fat, both from the deep fryer and from drippings, is collected from restaurants and recycled. But I have no idea what it is recycled into and what it's used for after that.