Do you think grocery shops and retail shops should start charging a price for each plastic bag used......?

Using plastic bags should be seen in the same light as smoking in a few years time.

How many people have died from "second hand plastic"?

Years ago before plastic. King Soppers out in Colorado would charge 3 cent to bring back your brown paper bags. Now in hear in Seattle they will start charge a 20 cent fee for the use of plastic bags. So bring your own. There is a article out there on the Internet on this. While it estimated the city of Seattle spends 260 million a year on the use of plastic bags!

If they really do spend that much then Yes for sure on getting rid of the plastic bags for a lot of cities. But I want to see the savings for the costumer. We saved millions of dollars so that money will lower the cost of certain food items in the store. The article explains the 20 cents will go towards the shop keeper (the grocery store). Down here in Florida we have bags that we can purchase for .99 cents and it saves at least 4 plastic bags. Why don't they give the bags out for a week instead of charging. In the long run the store is still saving money. I worked for Walmart a while back and at the time a medium size bag cost about 1 penny. Those pennies add up quick.

I disagree strongly about your "smoking" comment. Most of the time I use a reuseable canvas bag, but sometimes I get plastic. Now I can see a small fee, maybe even a deposit that gets refunded if you recycle, like with bottles and cans, but CA is talking about charging up to $0.25 per bag. When I get a plastic bag, I do one of two things with it - recycle it or use it as a garbage bag. Would the state prefer that I buy over-engineered "Glad" bags for my garbage, which are probably ten times as thick and absurdly large (using MUCH more plastic)? I live alone in an apartment. Should I then throw out this huge bag 1/4 full, or leave garbage rotting in my apartment for a month until I fill the bag completely? Now, I think it's obscene that only a small percentage of these bags are getting recycled, but why punish me for making smart choices and give me incentives to change to stupider ones?

I believe that retail shops SHOULD be charging us for each plastic bag used because the plastic used to make these grocery bags cannot be properly disposed of. How difficult is it to have a few cloth bags to bring into the supermaket instead of wasting useless plastic. Retail shops should charge $1.00 a bag, and maybe people would start to catch on that plastic bags are wasteful and create a garbage build-up on roads and highways. If a few cloth bags were re-used over and over again, the public would save more money. Although the main problem is that plastic bags are thrown out of car windows without thought and end up all over streets, which make a dirty impact on the city or town. If people thought for two seconds what they were doing to the enviornment using re-usable bags is a small part everyone can participate in.

No, I don't think charging is the solution either. There are alot of good ideas here. I myself, bought a dozen cotton canvas bags, made in my own country, they hold 3 times as much as the plastic bags too. They really do need to find a better alternative. Besides the fact that most people don't recycle them, and they last forever, I bet most of you aren't even aware of the amount of petroleum that goes into making the bags in the first place. Grocery bags, garbage bags, storage bags, they all need to go. Oh, and those 99 cent bags they sell at Walmart and other grocery stores, I wouldn't buy those either, read the label, what are they made out of...and where do they come from....? Nothing natural, and not in the U.S. You can get a dozen large all natural U.S. made (for my homies) on ebay for about a dollar each if you find the right seller, not to mention the craft stores sell them also.

I completely understand what you are saying. You think that ppl should use the cloth reusable bags. I would agree except for one thing. When I go grocery shopping I use the plastic bags in my small trash cans around the house. This way the bags get more than one use. If I went out and bought the cloth bags then I would have to buy small plastic trash can bags. They would only get one use then out they go. This to me defeats the whole purpose. I have not found an ulternitive to trash bags yet.

It is not up to the shop keepers to rectify this issue. It would be hard for someone in the business of selling groceries or other items to justify to a customer that they are now going to make a profit on the bags to discourage customers from using them because of the good for the environment.

Believe it or not, stores and other businesses already bear more burden then consumers in so many areas. Our trash costs more to pick up, we pay more for our water, natural gas and electric then a homeowner. We pay numerous fees and taxes that have nothing to do with how we run our businesses or how much money we take in. Its amazing how much is pushed off on small businesses just because we don't have a big voting block.

What we need is a more socially acceptable replacement. Reusable bags should be pushed more and made to be an acceptable replacement in society.

I think you might be a bit out of date. Yes, the US used to brown-bag all the shopping some years ago, and you can still see this in old films, but this was when the cheapest material for bags was brown paper made from wood-pulp, almost a by-product of the extensive logging that provided the timber to build most of the American infrastructure. Nowadays the US is short of home-grown timber, and also wood-pulp is more expensive because it is now used for other things besides paper, such as chip-board, insulation-board, fibre-board etc. So, recycled materials are the choice for brown paper now, to keep costs down, but, believe it or not, recycled materials are dearer than wood-pulp used to be. The cheapest material by far, as in other economies, is plastic, derived from petro-chemicals, which is why the US, like us, only rarely supplies brown bags nowadays . Hope this helps.

I don't think this is the best way to do it. I think making durable biodegradable plastic bags, coupled with not issuing plastic altogether is the answer. Whole Foods is doing that already, and they use 100% compostable paper bags. Once it happens most people won't miss plastic bags at all. Those who use them for waste at home can buy specific bags for that.

Yes in Ireland there is a 15cent fee for every plastic bag you use . Most people have stopedusing them and just bring your own bag .

But you can still get small plastic bags for say sweets and fruit free I think a fee should be put on these aswell to eliminate the use of all plastic bags