We’ve got some smart eco-minds that read the BR, so I know someone will have some helpful suggestion here.

Sadly, like everything these days, the Bellingham dog parks are having their budget cut. This is most evident in that there are no longer poop bags at the park for you to use to pick up and dispose of your dog’s messes. Given how often people were too lazy to pick up after their dogs when there WERE bags at the park, I might have looked for other ways to cut costs. But knowing how popular those parks are in our dog-loving corner of the world, I imagine the parks dept. was spending more than any of us would expect on poop bags each year. So, the plan is for the dog owner community to bring in plastic shopping type bags and “recycle” them by leaving them for others to use.

My question: Is it better to use a product twice, but throw it away after the second use, or to use it once but recycle after that use?

While we do our best to try and use the canvas shopping bag on our trips to the store, the fact is that with two kids and a scatterbrained husband, it doesn’t happen 100% of the time. So we eventually end up with a pile of shopping bags from Haggen/Target/etc. Usually, I take the bags to the recycling box at the local Haggen after we get a big enough pile of them. Of course we reuse a few around the house for whatever we can, but we always end up with more than we use. So, should I keep recycling or take these bags to the dog park? Which is the better move in a “green” sense? And even after that, how does the “helping out the local dog community” feel-good aspect factor in?

I’m inclined to just take them to the dog park. But you know me, I love dogs more than I love the earth.