Plastic bags are bad

Here's a link to a salon.com article from August 9th which expounds on the evils of plastic bags. Really baffles me why more people won't carry cloth/canvas bags with them for groceries and refuse plastic bags for things which they can just carry in their purse / pant pocket / wallet! I keep several cloth bags always in my car and atleast one in my backpack.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/10/plastic_bags/index.html?source=rss

The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They're made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

Why recycling plastic bags is a pain and a myth. Speaking of San Francisco....

But this city's vaunted recycling program, which is so advanced that it can collect coffee grounds and banana peels from urbanites' apartment kitchens and transform them into compost used to grow grapes in Napa Valley vineyards, simply cannot master the plastic bag.

And here's some guilt-free fashion
http://www.anyahindmarch.com/division/environmental_bags.aspx