Turning Farm Trash Into Smarter Plastic Shopping Bags

With hundreds of U.S. cities banning plastic grocery bags, the alternatives include customers bringing their own bags—which many have been doing—or grocery stores buying into something that is compliant with the new regulations.

To help with the latter, Command Packaging, a Los Angeles manufacturer of reusable bags, has invested $25 million to supply the California grocery market with a trademarked product called “smarterbags,” made from 100 million pounds of recycled agricultural plastic. To recycle the bags, the company opened up Encore Recycling in two California locations, and has implemented its own version of the successful European recycling model, which requires that agricultural plastic be recycled and used to make other recyclable products such as grocery bags.

Command Packaging says the bags are compliant with the new standards and can be used up to 125 times. Among its clients are Gelson’s, a Southern California grocery chain, with locations spanning from Orange County to Santa Barbara, California.

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