Huh? If "companies have spent millions trying to reduce the degradability of plastic in sunlight", then surely one would expect that most plastic bags today are not degradable? Of course they will degrade eventually, but if they last decades before doing so, they can cause considerable damage, both to the health and livelihood of other species, and aesthetically. According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodegradation#Indicative_lengths_of_degradation plastic bags take 10-20 years to degrade, vs 2-5 months for paper bags.

I agree however that plastic bags are not even necessarily the worst form of unnecessary and harmful packaging.

(Who knew that nappies/diapers took up to 800 years to degrade?!)

Well, now ,is this an example of a law from our new government? Ban plastic bags- I thought whaling and drought and a myriad of other things would have been priority but no! we ban plastic bags.
So do we go back to cutting down more trees to make brown paper bags? Or wooden crates instead of plastic?
Ah! This is the 'fresh' government.

Use reusable cloth or polymer bags - indeed, I avoid supermarket plastic bags because a) they don't hold much and b) they cut into your fingers and break. We have about 6 Coles "green bags" (in various colours) that are nearing on 3 years' old now and just as sturdy and much easier to carry. 6 is more than enough for a week's shopping, whereas with disposable plastic you might need up to 10. That's 10*52*3 = 1560 plastic bags vs 6 green bags - and I expect the green bags have at least another 3 years in them. It astonishes me that people still use disposable plastic bags.

Paper bags from plantation timber (and/or recycled paper) isn't a big problem except that they technically use more energy to manufacture than plastic bags. But if they're being manufactured using a clean energy source, paper bags are preferable to plastic.

It is worth noting if we all took card board boxes home as carriers it would be far worse.
Now every one or near it gets recycled out the back of super markets.
Few posters have addressed the health issues of cotton bags.
Country towns see truly filthy ones retrieved from the car, sometimes.
One check our girl told of her right not to fill those ones, but spoke of her aggressive neighbors coming into the shop with truly filthy ones.
Goats travel in that station wagon.
She fills them out of fear.
Why not brown paper bags? recycled paper bearing what ever adds you can sell, say let them steal 20 cents of us for every one.
Sometimes that would be 2 or even 3 dollars for some.
Plastic does rot, my fruit trees save water and thrive on mulch made party from them, paper bags can go in with that , chook manure powers the lot up ,sorry but thats your lot for today.

I am worried more about the damage that is done to our wildlife by the littering of plastic bags than about the environmental damage they cause, which I think is only minor compared to other environmental threats.
The government should be concentrating on bigger environmental issues rather than on changing light bulbs and bags.

People should be educated about responsibility of using and disposing of bags.
We need to focus on controlling of littering rather than banning plastic bags.
It is the littering that does most of the damage; not the bags themselves are the biggest problem.

Why can't all plastic bags be made of degradable materials anyway? We all need bin liners and most of the plastic bags we use are being recycled. I read somewhere that we've cut our use of plastic bags by about half already.

My local shopping mall exchanges 20 plastic bags for a cotton shopping bag, which I thought is a great initiative.

We need to let our supermarkets know that we do not want unnecessary packing materials around our produce.
Shopping at greengrocers and butchers rather than supermarkets will not only support small, local shops but will also reduce the use of unnecessary packaging materials.

Celivia sorry but those light bulbs add up to a very great deal of good.
It will be in this way, small things we all do, that we bring about change.
Truth is we have cut our use of plastic bags, some of us.
Clean up Australia and such has seen less litter thrown away, by some of us.
Out at sea, any sea any part of it, you will find plastic bags, thrown away some by people who call themselves conservationists.
Plastic is cheaper so we are stuck with it, that is sad but true.
Lets be innovative.
Charge ten cents deposit on every plastic bag, every bottle or container made of tin plastic any non biodegradable container.
At some special place near our food outlets have the recycling center.
We will see less litter.
But do not ask that we use cotton because it looks like we care more even if it is wrong.