Do you have suits or clothes that can only be dry cleaned? Dry cleaners return each piece of clothing back to its owner in a new bag of plastic, a waste that can be avoided by purchasing a garment bag for the dry cleaners to return your clothes. This will reduce the waste of plastic bags used to cover each piece of clothing, which is much better than just recycling all the plastic bags. This is part of the system of reducing, reusing, recycling — we hear cliché a lot, but the words are in that order for a reason, listed from least energy usage to most energy usage. Reducing your use of something (in this case, plastic bags) is better than accumulating plastic bags and trying to reuse them, which, in turn, is better than recycling the bags. Of the three options, recycling requires the most energy, because one thing has to be converted into another form. Reusing things uses more energy than reducing and reducing means avoiding accumulating an excess amount of things altogether, so there is nothing to reuse and nothing to recycle. Reduce, reuse, recycle!
