It’s so easy to denounce plastic shopping bags. They start to tear before you’ve finished filling them. They’re a waste of the oil used in their manufacture. They wind up in landfills by the millions, or floating along roadsides, or in the stomachs of marine mammals.
Some cities have proposed or enacted grocery-bag fees to discourage use. Other municipalities (and countries) have banned them outright.
Eventually plastic bags will no longer be a fixture in our lives. And I’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Wait! Don’t send the green squad over to tie a shopping sack over my head! I’m as dismayed by the waste of petroleum and the ubiquitous litter as anyone else. That scene from “American Beauty” of the plastic bag dancing in the wind was cute – but the moviemakers didn’t address the fact that the bag had to come down sometime.