How do grocery stores recycle plastic bags?

Question

So lots of grocery stores now provide bins where shoppers can drop off old plastic bags for "recycling." Does anyone know exactly how the stores recycle the bags? Do they actually reuse them as bags? Or are they somehow reprocessed for their raw materials, as with bottles, cans, etc.?

Answer 1

The bags are reprocessed and converted to a variety of marketable commodities.  Some of the film is recycled into more polyethylene film, some is made into plastic pellets, some is made into a post-consumer resin for use in pipe and other post-conumer plastic products, and alot of it is recycled into plastic composite lumber products (ie. Trex).

Plastic bags are actually becoming a quite popular feedstock because of the low cost to transport the low-mass material, and its exceptional strength.