This is yet another example of how Treehugger is promoting a myopic view of sustainability. You guys must think you have it all figured out and are expert environmentalists because you seem to keep being very one sided regarding your coverage.

Instead of focusing on behavior you're only looking at the objects you no longer value. Plastic bags do use less energy in manufacturing than paper, and there is a misconception that paper is better than plastic. Why not stop chopping down trees to make paper bags? How did you get to the point of preferring paper over plastic? It became a mainstream idea, and you don't have the facts to understand why you think this way.

So, lets give the plastic bag industry a break if they are trying to influence people who are not going to carry their canvas mesh bags to the grocery stores, but are hoping customers dead set on using plastic bags will value the idea of at least recycling them!

Same thing is happening with the light bulb situation. The mercury that is in the lamp and the ballasts is far more dangerous in the near term than the energy savings in their operation. They also require a ton more energy to manufacture, but you seem okay with China using their coal-fired power plants to make these energy-sipping puppies for you to have clean air in the USA? You're missing the big picture.

Eric, on what do you base your claim that plastic bags use less energy in manufacturing than paper? What about other externalities of manufacturing, like pollution and the infrastructure necessary to supply petroleum products to the bag manufacturers?

As for recycling, what can you recycle a plastic bag into? How much energy is used in that recycling, vs. making a new bag? What types of pollution is created?

Third, it seems like the target of this message (the one printed on the bag) is not that plastic disposable bags are better than paper, but that they are better than a reusable bag, which is completely unfounded. You can use a string bag an innumerable number of times, and you can repair it.

Just wanted to agree with Eric about the hypocricy of the enviornmental movement. I marched in the original Earth day demonstration while in high school. Things seemed to be going better in the 1970's in terms of personal responsibility (even though we were so ignorant of the big picture environmental damage.)
Ex: we learned this stuff:
1. reusuable bags are good
2. small cars- less gas (due to cost mostly)-
also gas rationing good- able to fill up car gas every other day (odd/even license plate encourged people to buy fuel effiecient cars.
3. solar energy panel credits- Reagan cut them. You could use it to heat your hot water. I remember in CO it was used to power outhouses above the tree line.
4. PUT A BRICK IN YOUR TOILET to save on water consumption. SHOWER WITH A FRIEND, yes those were the days.
5. Plant trees, go to 'fern bars', eat locally produced foods
6. Don't buy alot of new clothes, wear the same pair of pants a few times. Avoid dry cleaning.
7. Shop at Goodwill. It takes alot of energy to make clothing, plus shipping, and don't forget the slave labor.

Suprising back then- curbside recycling almost unheard of.

Anyway, even ' we old hippies'' had forgotten some lessons, but are remembering and learning others. Get a brick, put it in your toliet, don't buy so many clothes, xeroscape yards and buy energy efficent cars. At least its a start.
-Carol

My municipality doesn't accept plastic bags as part of normal recycling.

Eric, proof? For anything you say?

Assuming both the bags are made in the same place, of resources shipped from the same distance, brought to the same store, and recycled into new bags (if possabIe, I wonder if plastic has to be downcycled) until the origional material is all trashed, which REALLY uses more energy?

The hysteria over mercury seems to be absent of genuine science. Even if both bulbs go to the landfill, CFLs release less mercury than incandescents.

I like Eric, I bet he's an ally of the petroleum industry. What's wrong with plastic bags and the monsters they create when they accumulate?? Bag Monsters aren't so bad, you know... I'm a family monster with millions of little Bag Monster spawn to worry about. Some of them live under kitchen sinks, but most of them live in the bay and ocean. Search for my Bag Monster blog to learn more about how we're being oppressed world wide. All these bag bans are supposedly because we make an expensive mess, cause "environmental damage," and because a few of us were eaten by marine animals... Don't they know better than to eat Bag Monsters?