Bangladesh slapped an outright ban on all polythene bags in 2002 after they were found to have been the main culprit during the 1988 and 1998 floods that submerged two-thirds of the country. Discarded bags had choked the country's drainage systems.

Nylon fishing nets, fishing line, bags, 6-pack rings etc, kill hundreds of thousands of animals every year and will continue to do so for hundreds, if not thousands of years to come. Horrible, panicked and painful deaths by drowning, suffocation or internal damage. If Bangladesh can ban the plastic bag and get by, surely so could we!

I go to a grocery store called Aldi, and you pay for the bags and they offer plastic or paper. The plastic is more in price than the paper and i see a lot of people choose paper. So maybe if people were offered a choice they would do the right thing. I have hope.

I thought the plastic bags were supposed to solve all of our problems from using paper bags. Apparently, it messed up more stuff. Huh. Imagine that.

where I live there is a levy on plastic bags about 15c (Ireland) people use boxes or just carry the stuff

On a recent trip to Memphis I saw hundreds of plastic bag trees and bushes along I55 south. Believe it or not I didn't see anyone harvesting that crop, not anyone!

The big supermarkets might not be too keen to abandon plastic carrier bags, shoplifting was much more of a problem before their introduction.