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Shopping Bags Recycled: Ever feel guilty about throwing away plastic supermarket bags?

Smith’s Food King, which has three stores in Orange County, hopes so.

It has launched a supermarket shopping-bag recycling program through local schools. Students may bring used shopping bags to classrooms, where they will be collected in bins. The bins are then sent to a processor in South Carolina, which pays the schools $1 a pound for Smith’s bags and 20 cents a pound for competitors’ bags. The processor then recycles them into tall kitchen trash bags, which are sold at Smith’s Food King stores with this note: “These bags were made from the grocery bags you’ve recycled through your school.”