There are many uses for bread bags. Don’t toss them!

This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.

For years, I tossed out bread bags without realizing I was throwing out gold. But when I had a baby, I began to see that this humble piece of household trash is infinitely reusable. Ours are from Dave’s Killer Bread—but this advice could work with any bread bag.

I first used them for the abject little pile of poop-diaper and poop wipes you end up with after an intense diaper change. Since these bread bags are a long tube, rather than open-topped and gaping wide like a typical plastic shopping bag, you can tie this most toxic of household messes into them and turn the whole thing into a neat little ball before disposing of them in a larger trash receptacle.

Then, when our Kroger started running a program to recycle plastic bags and Saran wrap–type films, I drafted bread bags into service yet again, smashing all the unwanted plastic down in there and making a satisfying tube that stays small and neat, tucked in a cabinet throughout the week.

My latest revelation is that bread bags are the best possible receptacle for all the little bits of trash that accumulate on a road trip, particularly when your road trip involves a child. Once you put a discarded Cheez-It pouch or granola bar wrapper into your old Dave’s bag, it will not come out, even if you put that bag in the footwell of the passenger seat along with the eight-pack of seltzer and the personal backpack of snacks and books and toys you need near you for the drive. The trash stays where it’s put, unless you pick it up and overturn it—which you won’t do. And it looks different enough from every other bag in your overstuffed car that it won’t get lost.

Surely you detect a pattern: Bread bags segregate mess cleanly from the rest of the world. They offer a degree of psychological satisfaction to a person who is fighting an endless battle against entropy in her family home. And to reuse a bread bag is to marshal an already-extant wad of plastic and give it a second purpose before it departs this world for the landfill. These are small victories, but they are not nothing.