@Sorensoj I use grocery bags as liners for my trash bins, too! Of course it's only practical for small bins, but that's all I use. I can't even remember the last time I bought trash can liners. Lol.
About all the bacteria on bags... Yes, it's true, reused grocery bags are filthy. Covid has certainly made people more aware of it. But then, so is clothing. This fact serves to drive home another reason to use your own washable bags and not pay 5-10 cents at the store. You can throw them in the laundry... Just like clothing. (And if your state doesn't do away with disposable and start changing for reusable bags already, believe me, it's only a matter of time.)
Articles such as the one you linked to, often fail to mention just how much bacteria is on EVERYTHING. That's also a fact. Our stuff, especially those things we use and handle regularly, harbors bacteria and needs to be cleaned regularly. Consider your clothes again, for example. We remedy this by --you guessed it-- throwing them in the laundry, not in the trash. Why can't we think of grocery bags in the same way?
I don't even want to think about door knobs, cash, that bowl of mints or peanuts at your favorite restaurant or bar. How about shopping cart handles? Urine and mucus, anyone? I don't mean to be gross, but we can be convinced that anything is too filthy to reuse, especially those things that are more convenient not to.
At the rate we're destroying our resources and our planet, I think most people agree that we need to seriously reconsider, and reinvent when necessary, all the stuff we've deemed suitable for single-use only.
