You may be old enough to remember how they howled about killing the rain forests to make paper bags (As if old growth tropical hardwood forests were being clear-cut for the pulp mills) when they were all about saving the trees and demanded an end to paper grocery bags.
But the problem with plastic bags is : where do they go when you are finished with them? You put them in the trash and once a week or so someone comes around and collects them, along with the rest of the trash wrapped in plastic, and takes it all away.
To where?
They may be filling up the canyons and valleys around where you live. I live on an island. There's no room to put it.
Where I live, we are required to pick up our dog poop. Small plastic bags are provided for the purpose. To keep the town neat and tidy, we pick up the poop, seal it in a plastic bag and drop in in a handy trash receptacle(lined with a plastic bag). It is then collected and taken to the baler facility where it is crushed into bales with the rest of the trash and shipped to Seattle.
Yes. We seal our dog poop in plastic bags and ship it to Seattle.
What do they do with it in Seattle? Who cares? It's gone from here.
The answer is, as far as I can tell from sailing back and forth between here and Hawaii a few times, it goes in the ocean.
To me, and I could be wrong about this, it's insane.
Plastic trash is a real problem with more than 8 billion people on the planet. At least paper bags decompose over time. < / rant >
No, that's a lie ... I'm 71 yrs old.
And I DO remember all of that.
I never gave it much thought because I knew instinctively they were all full of shit (how's THAT for commeraderie, eh?)
Now with a few years under my belt, the obvious is obvious ... paper is better.