Nothing says wasteful quite like the plastic shopping bag. They are used for average of 15 minutes, the time it takes for a person to haul their purchases from the store, to the car, to home. Once its brief life is over, it usually winds up as garbage because it costs more to recycle a plastic bag than to produce a new one.

More than 200,000 plastic bags are dumped into landfills every minute where it takes 1,000 years for those pesky bags to photodegrade. Many plastic bags become airborne litter, tangled in tree limbs, clogged in storm drains, or billow like sails on the ocean.

The Ocean Conservancy reported cleaning up more than 354,000 bags during a coastal cleanup in the United States and 100 other countries. Planet Ark, an international environmental group, has tallied more than 100,000 whales, seals, turtles and other marine animals killed by plastic bags each year worldwide. And still Americans used more than 100 billion plastic bags last year, which required more than 12 million barrels of oil to produce, and cost more than $200 million per year to clean up as litter.

If each of us brought reusable bags to the store, we could save six bags a week, 24 bags each month, and 288 bags per year, according to Planet Ark. If just one in five Americans did this, we could save more than 1 trillion bags and 159 million barrels of oil over our lifetime. While many of us have already made the switch, some are reluctant, or just forgetful.

Many countries are helping people to remember to B.Y.O. Bags by banning the giveaway of disposable plastic shopping bags. Ireland passed a "PlasTax" of 20 cents per bag that dropped the use of plastic bags by 90 percent and raised millions of dollars for recycling programs. Australia enacted a voluntary program to reduce plastic bag use and 90 percent of Australian retailers have obliged. Many retailers, such as ShopRite, Aldi's, IKEA, and Whole Foods Markets, have voluntarily offered their own incentives of 2 cents per bag for up to 10 bags to people who bring their own reusable bags.

In 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to entirely outlaw "free" plastic bags in supermarkets. New York City is contemplating legislation that would require large stores to recycle plastic bags. Illinois has a petition circulating for a statewide ban on plastic bags. Denver has already created incentives for reusing plastic bags and may adopt an outright ban.

In Sullivan County, N.Y., officials have mobilized retailers to hand out free reusable bags to consumers through the "Come Clean-One Village at a Time" program. This program was designed to reduce the sheer volume of garbage in the county landfill, as well as remove the unsightly litter from the landscape.

"This is a direct, one-for-one savings," says organizer Patricia Diness. "Once a plastic bag enters the consumer stream, it will either end up in our landfill or on our landscape."

If you would like "do something drastic and ban the plastic" here's a few suggestions from www.PlanetArk.com:

Designate a local champion to coordinate your town's plastic-bag-free campaign.

Network with other community groups that might help

Compile a list of retailers in your town that use plastic checkout bags.

Enlist the help of your independently owned stores, especially ones offering reusable bags

Run an information night for retailers and the local community to attend.

Try to create a retailers' alliance that orders reusable bags in bulk

Work with your local government to ask them to sponsor a plastic bag-free campaign.

Get retailers to sign off on their commitment to go plastic bag free.

Set a launch date for when your town will be plastic bag free.

Make local launch-date announcement so all residents are aware of their town going plastic bag free.

Arrange a plastic-bag-free-town day with reusable bags to hand out, and local elected officials in attendance.

Shawn Dell Joyce is a sustainable artist and activist living in a green home in the Mid-Hudson region of New York. Contact her by e-mail Shawn@ShawnDellJoyce.com To find out more about Shawn Dell Joyce and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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