For our home delivery subscribers, their paper is often delivered in a red plastic bag. This bag is rather economical but can keep rain and snow off your paper and uses as little plastic as possible. Many subscribers don’t realize that there are two reasons we use our door-hanger bags. Number one, it keeps your paper dry because who likes soggy newspapers? Number two, it allows us to put your paper right on your door knob. Quite a few of our subscribers have a hard time picking the paper up off the welcome mat, and we pride ourselves on trying to get the paper right where our wonderful readers prefer to have it.

However, that little bag has a cost. Oh, the financial cost of that little red bag is less than a penny. In fact, if we put a mail or subscription reminder label on the paper, it is about the same cost as that bag. No, the real cost is that that bag will eventually reach the landfill or the recycling center. Now, such a small bag doesn’t represent a huge cost even compared to the metric tons of trash collected in the city, and surely they are recyclable. Like everything else, if a household receives both editions of the paper every week, that amounts to 104 bags every year. That’s a lot of bags. And yes, the bags are technically recyclable, as they are LDPE plastic. However, many people don’t realize it, but in our area, recycling plastic costs more than putting it in landfill. Again, not a lot, but it does have a cost.

So, what do you do with that little red bag? A few readers have taken one bag and put all the bags they get into it. Then, when that little bag is full of its fellows, the night before a paper comes out, they hang that bag, like a Christmas stocking, on their door knob. Our drivers then pick up the bag and bring it back to the shop, where we check them out for rips and tears (we responsibly dispose of damaged bags) and give them a quick disinfectant spray. Ironically, this has very little cost. Almost everyone at Great Falls Gazette helps with customer support on the telephone and website. While talking to someone, we often look over the bags and get them ready for reuse. Sometimes, we have to wait for the press to work. And our circulation guys are checking them out lightning fast. 🙂

This is just one way that we can reduce the impact of our trash on our community, and Great Falls Gazette is very happy to give these little red bags one, two, or ten more uses. Not wasting resources isn’t just about the environment; it’s also good practice to preserve resources and help combat unneeded wastefulness.

Do you have a great way to Reduce, Reuse, and/or Recycle? The Great Falls Gazette would love to hear about it. Email info@gfgazette.com (if the email is hidden, click the email, and it’ll magically appear), call us, or stop by our office at 1601 2nd Ave N and tell us all about it!

Author: Andy Anderson

Andy is publisher of Foxys Publishing Co, as well as pressman, ad sales, distribution and sometime janitor. He occasionally makes a wild attempt at writing but quite often is seen running around our offices trying to "Get 39 million things done today..."