Personally, I ask for paper bags at the grocery. Other stores, Lowes, JC Penney, Lowes Foods, and many mom-pop stores, offer no choice. The result is not only a landfill problem, but look at the types of litter along the road. In my youth, many a kid appreciated the occassional tossing of a Coke bottle. That meant 5 cent at the store toward a candy bar, or if you brought two, amybe a Coke for yourself.

BILL IN A BANNED BAG
Gov. Beverly Perdue signed legislation Wednesday that bans plastic shopping bags for large retailers on the Outer Banks and sent the new law back to its chief patron, Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, in — wait for it — a plastic shopping bag.

Basnight, a Democrat from Manteo who owns a restaurant there, relentlessly pushed the bill to help rid the beaches of wafting bags. Many of his fellow Democrats saw it as an unexpected fixation. The law makes the Outer Banks portions of Currituck, Hyde and Dare counties the only jurisdictions in the nation to join San Francisco in banning the plastic totes.

Basnight said one of Perdue’s aides delivered the bag containing the signed bill and the pen used to do it. He said he’s never received legislation in that fashion in his 26 years in the legislature.
So what happened to the plastic bag?
“I hope we recycled it,” Basnight said today.
News and Observer – Raleigh, NC 25 June 2009