You could rinse or wash & dry the plastic produce bags and bring them back to the store. As long as nothing started molding in them!
Or, for things like apples that really don't leave any trace behind, you could label the bags with a sharpie.

The reuse of the 3R's.

we reuse a lot of our plastic produce bags. just flip them inside out and leave them overnight to dry out, voila! i thought about buying resuable bags, but it's always buy buy buy...

I have some of the cotton mesh bags (similar to those shown) but if you are weighing your produce in those bags when purchasing - you'll pay for them many times over. I also have bags like these: http://www.grassrootsstore.com/reuseablemeshproducebag10pack.aspx that are very light (and very low cost). One thing to watch out for is moisture management of your produce - things will dry out more in the fridge in a mesh bag than a conventional plastic one!

There are also compostable bags you can buy - Whole Foods has them (at least in my area.) But I also rinse and re-use the ones from the store. And I bypass bags altogher in the summer when I get vegs from our CSA! If I have time I also store in casserole type dishes after rinsing and peeling/cutting/etc since it also has the advantage of me being more likely to use them in cooking if I don't have to do that kind of prep on a weekday.

i actually bought these off of amazon and they work great!

http://www.amazon.com/flip-tumble-5-Pack-Reusable-Produce/dp/B002UXQ7QQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1279831541&sr=8-1

I find that many of our veggies from the CSA do store better in plastic bags. But I have tried to get into the habit of rinsing and drying them. They don't last forever, but I can usually get 4-5 uses.

Most of the time I just throw the veggies in the cart - no bag. I do have some of the open mesh bags, but depending on what it is, I dump it out and re-bag at the register so I don't have to pay the bag weight.

I get months if not more use out of plastic produce bags.

I checked w/my local Whole Foods. You can bring your own container and they will weigh it so you don't have to pay for the weight of your container. I wouldn't be surprised if other stores would do this also.

I have a set of Fridgesmart Tupperware boxes and often transfer produce from our reusable light mesh bags into these vented boxes for storage. I think they function like mini-crisper drawers and they work really well, especially with leafy greens.

I picked mine up thrifting but they might be a bit spendy to buy new. There's not much to them, though. They have a corrugated bottom and two little vents you can adjust for airflow. I bet it'd be easy to rig something up that works the same (e.g. - any food storage container w/lid left slightly ajar or holes punched into it).

Our solution was a two-stage discovery.

First, we happened upon biofresh zip-top bags for refrigerator storage and found they worked really well at keeping produce fresh for longer than usual.

Then, we realized that rather than using our cloth bags at the store and then transferring them to the biofresh bags once home, we could just take the biofresh bags to the store. (Yes, it took an embarrassingly long time for that brainwave to strike.)

I just reuse the plastic bags when I can. And then do a combination of things, like storing washed grapes in a colander, cutting fruit the day I buy it (like a melon) and putting it in tupperware, and then using ziplock bags for things that need to be in a bag.

We have had some success in reusing the plastic boxes that come with the prewashed mixed greens.

If you're using the mesh bags, one time have a grocery cashier weigh them empty, remember that weight, then tell all future cashiers the exact weight of the bag so it can be tared.

I'm a cashier at thatbignaturalfoodsgrocerychain and people do this all the time, it's no bother at all.

If you're the crafty type and don't like to throw out fabric scraps, I found this tutorial via the blog Sew, Mama, Sew! during Scrap Buster Month. A great way to not "buy, buy, buy", but use every last bit!

http://etownhooks.blogspot.com/2009/10/scrapppy-reusable-produce-bag-tutorial.html

It's still plastic, but we LOVE greenbags: https://www.getgreenbags.tv/

We get the mixed lettuces from our co-op in these bags, and it always stays super fresh for a week at least. I just rinse them out, return them to the co-op, who gives them back to the farmer for them to refill.

I skip bags for most of my produce. I only use it for the things that are all wet from the misters and will make a mess for the cashier (lettuce, green onions, herbs...). For those, I save and reuse the store's normal plastic bags.

We have a two-pronged approach: we use cloth bags at the store, and then we put the items more likely to dry out (spinach, lettuce, etc) in Green bags, which also extends their freshness by quite a bit. For veggies that don't dry out as easily (peppers, carrots, mushrooms), we usually just leave them in the cloth bags. One other handy note: if you wrap celery in aluminum foil, it keeps for much, much longer.

www.3bbags.com saw this in this months martha stewart!!!

oh and they say that they weigh just as much as the store bags!