By Dean Sensui, Star-Bulletin
The latest in trash-bag trends: Clear,
and better for the environment.

Choosing a garbage bag:
It's a matter of mils

Thick is better.

You know this if you've ever struggled to lift a trash bag out of the can, only to have the bottom burst open, exposing all that dripping, smelly garbage.

Thickness is determined by the "mil," each representing 1/1,000th of an inch. The higher the mil the thicker the bag -- and the higher the price, because more material is used.

Contractor trash bags and oil drum liners -- the ultimate supermen in clean-up bags -- are at least one mil thick and may be as much as 3 mil, such as Ruffies "Extra Heavy Duty Clean Up Bags." You can load these with rock, dry wall, wood, brick, wire, pipe, or tree branches, but these items may exceed the city's 75-pound trash pick-up weight capacity.

Ruffies 55-gallon capacity Drum Liners at 1 mil feature "rip-stop plastic" that reportedly resists tearing through use of a resin blend.

Most people can get away with mil thickness as low as 0.70 in the 30- to 39-gallon range -- these include "Large Trash Bags" and "Lawn and Leaf Bags" -- if you don't make them too heavy.

You can also select varieties with attached ties, instead of the standard twist-tie.

Draw-string bags allow you to tie the top with a built-in fastener. There's tape-closure bag which is "activated" by removing a strip of adhesive and wrapping it around the cinched top.

Colors? Green, gray, yellow -- though dark green remains most common.

There's even a clear trash bag -- which breaks down more quickly in landfills so is better for the environment -- but also puts on vivid display all that moldy trash. Ruffies "Sure Sak" is a clear "jumbo" trash bag 1 mil thick with a 40-gallon capacity.

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By Tim Ryan, Star-Bulletin.