Michael,

Thanks for posting this. Even those of us who are using canvass bags have work to do; insisting every time we go to a store for one or two items and happen to be without our reusable bag that, no, really, we don't need a plastic bag.

I'm encouraged that Whole Foods is eliminating plastic bags from all of its stores starting this EarthDay. It sends a strong message, and it encourages their shoppers to buy reusable bags which they hopefully will end up using in other stores, spreading the message that way.

PD columnist Connie Schultz wrote about personally quitting plastic bags this week. She writes:

When I started writing this column, there were 47,055,984,738 reasons to stop using plastic bags. That was the number of bags consumed so far in the world this year, according to the Web site, reusablebags.com.

I thought it was enough that I reused the plastic bags, but they still end up in the trash. The site lists all kinds of harrowing statistics, including this one: Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine life die every year after eating discarded plastic bags they mistake for food.

The wake up call for me was seeing the LA Times' Pulitzer Prize winning series Altered Oceans. The online content is amazing, including video and photos of scenes like Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean where a patch of plastic debris twice the size of Texas washes up.

We need an effort that encourages more retailers to ban plastic bags. Or we can consider a tax on plastic bags as they did in Ireland (see Susan's comment above). We can begin by thinking through how to implement a ban or tax, maybe at the county level, and how do we encourage retailers (by researching how it works in Ireland and San Francisco and coming up with a transition strategy, I think). We'll collect ideas on how to do this here.