I pass a landfill regularly and the plastic shopping bags are what's "blowin' in the wind."   If we'd all take our own shopping bags and use those instead of paper or plastic, we would generate a great deal less trash in the landfill and save energy and natural resources that are necessary to produce bags.  Kroger gives shoppers a five cents refund for each bag brought from home, whether plastic or cloth.  Using cloth bags to hold groceries and other purchases may not seem like much, but when combined with other energy-saving habits, like hanging clothes out to dry, we'd have a greener world.

I agree with Umbra that the most impactful decisions are not the everyday ones.  But what if we add up all of those little everyday ones over a year, ten years, or a lifetime?  They do have an impact at that scale -- and I think it's still worth looking at those little everyday choices so we can be making informed choices even about the small stuff.  I would be curious to know what the impacts of a year's worth of paper bags versus a year's worth of plastic are -- manufacturing, recycling, landfills, etc -- and the impacts of beer bottles versus beer cans -- which requires more energy to process in a recycling facility.

Sometimes it's the big stuff, but sometimes the little stuff can have a big impact.

nobody is trying to argue that plastic bags have no impact. clearly they do: they require fossil fuels to make and transport and take up space in landfills.

ok, organic hemp bags are the way to go: but they, too, have impact! they, too, require fossil fuels to make and transport and take up space in landfills.

the point is that everything has an impact, but some have less of an impact.

the other point is that some choices have a greater impact than others. if it's a choice between biking to work (instead of driving) or using an organic hemp shopping bag, biking should be a priority. it's like your budget: if you're looking to tighten the belt, you'll look at where you're spending the most money, and decreasing those amounts will be your priority.

I can tell you that using recyclable diapers is having an affect on global warming.  We produce clearly 50L less of trash a week and though we use more water and nuclear powered electricity, we're polluting the water with organic matters and natural soap and we bought a super-efficient washing machine.  And when I see what happens to that high tech thin gel liner when you put pampers in water (it blows up into a slimy mass 10 times it's original volume, so just think of those diapers in a landfill when it rains) I'm convinced that this is greener to put up with the extra time and work involved.  

If it's worth mentioning to have a meat-free diet once a week, why not do it every day?  Should we do all the other good things only once a week?  Is it really so hard for people to eat vegetables, grains, and fruits?  If someone doesn't feel full on a vegan diet (myself included), they can have milk products and still the diet will have only 1/10 of the impact of a meat-based diet.  Anyone who thinks they need meat should try curd fried in ghee.  Hare Krishna.

I think it's really important to mention some facts about landfills which the vast majority of folks, like 99.9%, don't know. I also think it's vitally important to think of bigger-picture issues as has been said all along.

Here's the real kick in the pants though: there is one archaelogist who began undertaking scientific excavations of landfills some time ago (Dr. Rathje), part of the continuing "Garbage Project". The good doctor started with the largest landfill on the planet, Fresh Kills in NYC. Every subsequent excavation has drawn basically the same conclusions. Notably, what makes up more than 70% of every landfill known to man is paper. Plastic, all of it, packaging, diapers, bottles, measures only a fraction of what paper does. Across the board an everywhere. In his first excavation, with all his mentors telling him he was crazy, he found, among countless other things, an entire intact newspaper from the 1890s! Rathje has proved, time and again, that biodegradation, of anything, simply doesn't happen in "your average" landfill. Hence we see many landfills being retro-fitted to accomodate the findings that no matter what, for biodegradation to take place, there must be air and water. Getting air and water to the middle and bottom of a humongous pile is no mean feat. Newly constructed landfills benefit from this new knoledge.

To me the plastic thing is a bit of an environmental red herring. All through my 20s I avoided it like the plague. First off, paper production, of "your average" paper, is highly toxic, always has been infamously toxic, on par with plastic prodcution. I've heard recycling paper is more toxic than producing plastic new. Judging from the facts about landfill make-up, plastic bags are much more landfill and eco friendly than paper ones. Also, looking at the facts, one becomes much more concerned with their paper "consumption" rather than how many plastic bags one uses.

The bigger picture has us reusing everything from the get-go, and using items which are made to last and be re-used for a long time. In some cases, hard plastic products can last many lifetimes, especially compared with the "organic" options. I can no longer see plastic as the evil I once thought it to be. There are too many great uses for plastic, many things we take for granted, in medicine, for example, and not enough bads, all told, to consider plastic any worse than, or even as bad as, paper.

why plastic is evil?  Try destruction of natural habitats like ANWR to drill the oil, oil spills that occur daily turning our water into oil slicks, air, water, and noise pollution from transporting the oil, and the ecological sacrifice zones called refineries used to make your plastic.

All this for a product that is totally unnatural and takes forever to biodegrade, choking, poisoning, and otherwise harming wildlife who unknowingly eat or get caught in it, and poisons animals, including humans, with things like pseudo estrogens.  And forget landfills, paper biodegrades exponentially faster in nature.

You said that you've "heard recycling paper is more toxic than producing plastic new."  Well, don't believe everything you hear, especially from someone who's clearly either uninformed or part of the petroleum industry.  You couldn't be more wrong, recycling paper is nowhere near as toxic as creating plastic (see first paragraph).

Finally, you claim that "[j]udging from the facts about landfill make-up, plastic bags are much more landfill and eco friendly than paper ones."  Huh?  The study purported to show that paper makes up more of the garbage in landfills, not that plastic biodegrades faster.  (I have very strong doubts about even this claim.  For one thing, if the researher found paper from the 19th century, he or she was looking at very old landfills that obviously wouldn't have much plastic.)

Conclusion: it's best by far to use reusable cloth bags.  Killing trees is bad, but so is drilling, transporting, and refining oil to make and unnatural product.  Plastic is evil and should be avoided wherever possible.

The fact that most paper is made from virgin wood fiber is heinous. All of our forest have been clear cut for more than 100 hundred years straight for construction material and for paper, straight up. I don't see how drilling for oil, whether in the ANWR or elsewhere, is worse than clearcutting forests.

Show me the statistics/facts that paper production and paper recycling are not quantitatively as bad as plastic production. Have you not heard of all the horrid effects on environment and people from paper production?

Finally, if you question anything about the facts I iterated about landfills, look them up anywhere online. You leap in logic by_assuming_ that ultimately the real "problem" is whether or not something will biodegrade at some point (plastic does biodegrade, though not as quickly as paper). In fact the problem is that nothing is biodegrading, and not because of plastic, not by any means, because of the way landfills have been designed, and in the end the true problem is that we get over-filled landfills.

Look it up. Plastic makes up such a small percentage of landfills one can draw 2 conclusions: 1) that once landfills are properly designed, the majority of landfills (70+%) will be biodegrading quickly, thus the small percentage makeup that is plastic will not contribute significantly, not as significantly as paper, to the over_filling problem, and 2) there must not be nearly as much plastic in production as paper if it makes up such a small percentage of landfills (again, _look at the facts, find them anywhere; the archaeologist, the world's premier expert on landfills, is Dr. Rathje, that's R-A-
T-H-J-E).

You should really check yourself regarding your bleeding-heart "oil drilling is worse than clear cutting" balderdash. You're only hurting the environmental movement.

I think your ideology is totally blinding you.  I NEVER EVEN IMPLIED that killing trees was worse than drilling, trasporting, and refining oil.  They're equally bad, and supporting plastic is a highly anti-environmental position.  Nor did I even imply "that ultimately the real 'problem' is whether or not something will biodegrade at some point (plastic does biodegrade, though not as quickly as paper)."  There are many real problems, and whether something biodegrades and how long it takes to do so are just two of them.  As I said, killing trees and the destruction caused by making plastic are others.

Like I said, carrry cloth bags and containers for bulk foods.  If I had my way, the bag and container industries would be eliminated.  They're totally unecessary and very environmentally destructive.