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When green bags die ...

Yep they can be recycled Sandra - they're made of a plastic calledpolypropylene, and once they're worn out you just drop them off atyour supermarket's plastic bag collection centre.

But unlike regular polyethylene shopping bags that can get recycledhere in Austraila, green 'eco' bags have to be shipped overseas.It's not that we don't have the technology to recycle them - it'sthat we pay award wages.The polypropylene the green bags are made of can be recycled, butthe stitching that holds them together can't. So before any greenbag is recycled all those stitches have to be unpicked andseparated from the plastic. It's very labour intensive, and unlessyou're paying very low wages you can't hope to turn a profit fromthe recycled product.Which is where shipping the bags to China comes in. If Chineseworkers received the same pay as workers here do it wouldn't beprofitable to recycle the green bags there either, and they'd allend up in landfill. Talk about your ethical dilemma...So green bags save on landfill, energy and material - but only ifyou use them a couple of hundred times and then drop them off atyour supermarket for recycling. And because they look less likejellyfish we shouldn't see too many turtles choking on the onesthat make it into the wild.Just try not to build up a bigger collection of them than you canuse in one shopping lifetime.