It makes me sad a guy who helped introduce me to the wonders of science is now saying things that get him described as “anti-science”.

On Dilbert — I like the strip a lot. It doesn’t bother me that Adams is an antiscience loon, any more than it bothers me that BA is an atheist/agnostic (at least I assume he is; if he isn’t he can correct me). I don’t just read things by people I agree with. Heck, I love Heinlein’s SF books; that doesn’t mean I buy into his crackpot right-wing ideology.

They are reasonably priced (~5 cents each), but it’s cheap enough that shopping centers would very much want to just freely distribute the bags, attract more customers, and cut the trouble of collecting 50 won (~ 5 cent) coins. Hence, enforcement by law.

It is actually much more effective than you might imagine. You know how many women would love to buy ~$100 shoes but fume if asked to pay $1/hour for parking…

Plastic being non-biodegradable is irrelevant if the bags wind up in a landfill. Paper doesn’t break down in landfills either. Paper bags take up a lot more space, weigh a lot more, and require cutting down trees to make them. Before you try to claim that it’s the leftover parts of trees cut for lumber, you should look at the forests cut down in the southeastern US and fed into giant pencil sharpeners to make paper.

A bundle of 400 1/6 barrel bags weighs about 60 pounds (I’ve lifted plenty in my 30 years in a grocery store. It is about 75 cm long, 50 cm wide and 30 cm high (guestimates, but that should be pretty close.

A box of 1000 plastic bags weighs about 14 pounds, and is about 30 cm cubed.

Furthermore, it is my understanding that ethylene was a waste product of the cracking process in producing gasoline before the invention of polyethylene. I think it was just burned off.

Of course littering is a problem, but that’s as true of paper bags as anything else. (I’d love to see a cop pull over someone who throws a lit cigarette on the highway and give him a ticket for littering. We saw many brush fires along the highway one very dry summer, most likely due to cigarettes.)

So in plastic bags we use less space in transport, storage and disposal. They are recyclable, weigh less, costing less in fuel to transport, and they amount to air pollution transformed to a harmless, even useful, substance.

Even if I’m wrong on the details, I hope I’ve made the point that the whole picture is much more complex than “Oooh look at that ugly plastic bag hanging in the pretty tree!”

I live in of the wine counties in CA; once in awhile a vineyard will rip out old vines and then fumigate the ground, insulating the chemicals with large lengths of Visqueen-like material. The last time this happened along the Russian River there was plastic along the entire length from where the stuff washed into the watershed (pushed by winter storms) near Hopland clear into the Santa Rosa drainage. It was an eyesore, festooning the trees and shrubs along the river for over a year.
I visited the Copper Canyon area in Mexico a few years ago. We flew into a small town mid-way down the Pacific Coast to start the rail and bus journey. There was plastic bag litter everywhere; no roadway, roadside, or field in any city or small town escaped the blight.

Plastic is recyclable; most supermarkets have places where bags can be returned. They get recycled/remade into more plastic stuff.
People are the problem, whether in Mexico or here in the U.S. It is so easy to toss an empty bag, and the comment above which noted that bags don’t biodegrade readily is on the mark.

When I was a kid my grandma used to walk to the neighborhood market with a wheeled basket. If she didn’t need a whole lot of stuff, she had her own shopping bag made of fabric. Everything changed when we began driving to the big supers and were provided with paper bags to hold the groceries.
Safeway (and probably other stores) are now selling fabric bags which can be used to haul your stuff home. They’ve tried this before, several years ago, but the idea never caught on. Perhaps it will this time, because we seem to be getting more conscious about the environment and what we’ve done to it.