Who’ll be left holding the bag?

Paper or plastic?

I always preferred paper bags over plastic for the several reasons: they decompose faster even when put into a land fill, they can be recycled with the newspapers and junk mail, and they can be burned in a burn barrel at the cabin. On the negative side, paper bags are more difficult to store at home and don’t work well in the kitchen garbage cans (they soak through when you dispose of anything moist).

Plastic bags are easier to store, can be used in the garbage cans, and can be recycled by taking them back to the local Wal-Mart and putting them in a convenient collection bin they have out front. (I could do the same back in NJ at the Kings or ShopRite.)

BTW, here in north-central PA, garbage collection is done on a pay per bag. For two bucks you get a sticker to put on your 33-gallon plastic garbage bag that you set out on the street for pick up. (After the first coyote, feral dog, raccoon, or bear rips mine apart, I’ll get myself a garbage can, a chain and maybe a bin to put it all in.)

San Francisco has recently banned all plastic bags for environmental reasons. They have ignored the economics (one cent to make a plastic bag, four or five cents for a paper), the energy consumption (significantly more for paper), the cutting and milling of pulp wood for paper, and a number of other arguments against paper.

The article linked above ends with a discussion of reusable bags:

Yet another alternative is to sell consumers reusable bags.

“The paper versus plastics question takes us off the issue, which is consumption,” says Vincent Cobb, who offers reusable bags and containers on the Internet. He admits to using plastic bags, which he calls a “fantastic product,” but not as many as in the past.

“Getting into the habit of bringing your own shopping bag,” he says, “can slash this problem across the board.”

While this may indeed solve the problem of using a consumable product to carry your purchases, I don[‘t think it would work. Perhaps in a big city environment where you can stroll down to the corner store to pick up a loaf of bread or a quart of milk for tonight’s dinner, it might work. But out in suburbia and rural America? Forget about it. Out here you go shopping once a week or perhaps every two weeks and you stock up—big time. That’s why they have those big carts, no? Just how many bags of groceries do you bring home on each trip? For just two of us, one week's shopping results in perhaps eight or ten Wal-Mart plastic bags. Many of which get reused as garbage bags and the rest get recycled. There is no way we could possibly take that many reusable bags with us to go shopping. And just think about the family with four or five kids! My God, they need the SUV just to haul their groceries home.