Valerie you are letting your imagination run away with you. Cruise ships have to store all their waste and dump it when they reach port so they are out of this particular equation.
Plastic bags are a real problem but with you obfuscating and getting so many things wrong you divert attention from this.
I agree we should not just tax the plastic bag out of existence but keep on message, there is no reason we cannot replace them all.

Plastic may be used in cigarettes to hasten non-smoking.
" Flame retardant plastic and fire resistant plastic compound materials are produced by RTP. "

It works for metho drinkers. " Denatured alcohol, also called methylated spirits has additives to make it poisonous, bad tasting, foul smelling or nauseating, to discourage recreational consumption.. Pyridine, methanol, or copper sulphate can be added to make denatured alcohol poisonous, and denatonium can be added to make it bitter."

Health warnings and arsenic may be included in drugs like Ice and Ecstasy.

Just another Left-wing catastrophist fantasy to demonstrate Valerie's moral superiority. Too bad she can't get the facts right.

Take plastic bags as an example: for a start, she's talking about lightweight HDPE plastic shopping bags, such as those used in supermarkets. There are many other types of plastic shopping bags, including the so-called "Green", reusable bags which are now SOLD by supermarkets to gullible people like Valerie.

Most HDPE bags are NOT single use: they are reused numerous times for numerous purposes, such as picking up dog droppings, carrying your kids' wet swim suits and towels home from the pool, lining small kitchen bins and storing out-of-season clothing, to name just a few. And most are correctly and harmlessly disposed of in the normal garbage collection and go to landfill along with all your other waste. If plastic shopping bags were not available for such purposes, what would be used? Most likely people would buy the various packs of plastic bin liners, also available in supermarkets. Or they'd slyly walk away from the dog droppings, and wet clothing would be allowed to ruin whatever other contents your kids have in their school bags.

And what would you use to carry home your groceries? The "Green" bags? Probably not, since many supermarket visits are not planned. You might, of course, if you're prepared to buy more "green" bags on every such unplanned visit and you'd soon have a cupboard full of them, until you ran out of space and sent the lot to landfill out of frustration.

The cost to produce and distribute plastic bags to retail outlets is considerable and the lighter the bags, the less the cost, particularly in terms of fuel burned: HDPE bags are by far the most economical to make and distribute because of their light weight, so the "green" bag's benefits are largely illusional. And eventually, no matter what type of bag you use, it will end up in landfill: the lightweight HDPE bags take up far less landfill space.

If there is a genuine problem with plastic bag litter, fine the perpetrators.

For thousands of year until a few years ago, people carried goods without plastic bags, and still do in many places.
They had nothing for removing dog droppings though. What can we use instead of plastic bags for this purpose?

Plastic bags can be recycled as compressed bales, then used as an alternative to coal, to create quality, "direct reduction" steel with a much smaller carbon footprint!

Moreover, given clean cheap safe carbon free energy is made available by authorizing governments!? It's possible to make hydrocarbon based fuel or plastic from Co2 and hydrogen harvested directly from sea water!

Interestingly, as copious Co2 is removed from seawater, the atmosphere contributes similar amounts to make good that which has been removed! Given the natural affinity between water and Co2!

Various methods have been trialed? And while we are pumping seawater around an extraction plant, we could also desalinate it, using the new and vastly (four times) cheaper deionization method, which produces around 90-95% potable water!

As for Co2, I prefer proven vacuum towers and the application of thirty inches of mercury at the top of the tower, followed by stock standard fractional distillation to separate the resultant gases.

The Co2, then subjected to repeated compression cycles to liquefy it, thereby allowing compounding with liquid hydrogen to occur, not too dissimilar to the production of ammonia, or the catalytic conversion of (wasted) methane to liquid methanol?

And better than current planet wide flaring, which adds tons of Co2 to the atmosphere daily!? Much of which could be extracted, as above, to make sustainable liquid fuel, plastics or some fertilizer?
See google tech talks on U tube!
Alan B.

Memo to Valerie

Note Sister Jennifer's superior article to instruct yee http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=18778.

Re your paragraph 5. Have you not heard Trump will also Make Australia Great Again (MozGA)?

Reckon we should replace Aussie plastic bags with good'ol American paper shopping bags.

Sure more Aussie forests will be buzzed down, but our Koala BEARS are eating too much anyhoo.