Sustainable living

I am incorporating some sustainable living habits in to my life. One thing I have done is bought grocery bins in order to decrease my plastic bag consumption. But I have come across a problem. It is too stinky and unsanitary to leave a huge black garbage bag under the kitchen sink (it also wouldn't fit under there). It is also unsanitary to continuously place garbage into an un-bagged waste container without cleaning it every time you empty the contents into a large garbage bag. Cleaning uses even more polluting chemicals, which get washed away into our water system. So what I'm getting at is : what is the sustainable living way to empty your garbage into a small sized garbage bin without using those perfect-size grocery plastic bags? And if you didn't use grocery plastic bags, you would be buying small garbage bags. How do we sustain a life free of plastic bags?