Open a Bag of Charcoal

Steps

1. Orient yourself. There is a front and a back. The front side has clean loops, the back side string is ragged and knotted at the end.
2. Understand what you are doing. There are really two strings here woven together. There is a string on the front side which is pushed through in loops through each of the little holes in the bag. Then a string on the back side is threaded through them also in a looping fashion. The end of the string on the left side is then knotted onto the leftmost loop. What you need to do is remove that knot and free up the end of the backside string so that you can pull it.
3. The endgame. Once you have the end of the backside string all there is left to do is pull and the whole apparatus becomes unraveled. You can then extract the frontside string leaving you with two strings in your hand, a flap of paper to lift off the bag (and recycle) and finally a wide open bag of non-fossil fuel. No hassle, no pointless yanking, no scissors.