These totes serve as 100% reusable, waste-reducing shopping bags! They are quite light weight (though good and durable) so they fold up pretty small if you want and you can just tuck them away in a pocket or a purse. Then when the time comes you can pull out a handy, très chic, environmentally friendly substitute for a plastic bag. Plastic bags? They are kind of nasty. See, the thing about them is that plastic bags can be tricky to recycle. I did little research and as far as I can see, it is possible, at least with some types (#2 and #4, as marked on the bottoms), generally by taking them to grocery stores, or possibly if you contact your garbage pick-up folks. None the less, it is tricky, and every bit of information that I found said, reduce, reduce, reduce, reuse, reuse, reuse, and just avoid getting them as much as possible, because those suckers don’t decompose! I’d say lots of them go straight to the landfill. Landfill sites account for about 38% of Canada's total methane emissions. Methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (the muck that comes out of cars.) Not a good scene. Sometimes to reduce the stress on the landfill (it’s a hard job being a landfill) solid waste is “burned away”, but that creates other environmental problems. Burning garbage produces acid gases, carbon dioxide and toxic chemicals that must be treated with expensive air pollution control equipment to avoid contributing to acid rain, ozone depletion and air pollution. Again, not a really good scene. So, long story short: great idea to avoid plastic bags altogether. It’s worthwhile to note that "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" are supposed to be in order of importance, the reason recycling gets all the hype is that unfortunately, it is the only one that doesn't involve actually partly changing your lifestyle. Even so, here are a couple of resources to help you out with recycling them, and also just some general recycling guides: http://www.ehow.com/how_10885_recycle-plastic-grocery.html or http://www.obviously.com/recycle/ .