I have tried to make my kitchen more sustainable. I’ve stocked up on reusable Swedish dishcloths and switched to bamboo paper towels and even took up composting for a bit — until I opened my bin to find it crawling with maggots and took a self-imposed hiatus. But there are just some things, like trash bags, that are always going to be best used once and disposed of.
While I have written about spending money on such unimportant things as fake fruit made of stone, museum-quality paper napkins, and a color-changing mushroom nightlight, I have never been one to invest more than the bare minimum in a trash can. I’ve always gone with cheap, open-top plastic ones with small footprints that take up less space in the apartment-size-kitchens I use them in. For the longest time, I’d just use plastic grocery-store bags as trash bags (who among us has not?!) because, while imperfect, they are a perfect size for the type of trash can I prefer. But then New York City’s plastic-bag ban took effect. Before long, my stash of makeshift trash bags disappeared — only to be replenished when, in moments of total desperation, I purposely forgot my tote bags on grocery-store trips, knowing I’d be able to pay a few cents for a few more plastic ones to get me through another week’s worth of garbage.
Glad’s small drawstring trash bags actually came into my life by accident. My mom sent me my first box when she couldn’t find a different type of tiny trash bag (with colorful stripes) that I obsessed over after seeing it lining a trash bin in her bathroom. The Glad ones, she thought, were the next best thing, because they come in fun colors beyond black or white. Those fun colors do appeal to me, but it didn’t take long to see that they are just one of many details that make Glad’s small trash bags a revelation. The bags’ colors correspond to scents; light-blue bags smell of Beach Breeze, while pale-neon-green ones smell of Sweet Citron & Lime. I wouldn’t bathe myself in either, but I’ve used both and each smells better than (and masks the funk of) whatever trash is inside of it.
Like the plastic grocery-store bags I relied on for so long, these are also the perfect size for the types of smaller trash cans I use. But unlike those bags — and other similarly sized, scented trash bags we’ve written about before — the Glad bags have a drawstring top. This is crucial: The last thing you want to do with a trash bag of any size is fuss with tying it up when it’s full to the point of overflowing, and the drawstring on these really does make closing and tying and disposing of them a cinch. As the saying (now) goes, one man’s trash (bag) is another man’s treasure.
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