. . of the single use grocery bag. Since customers are no longer allowed to bring re-usable bags into the stores, the stores are providing the old single use bags for free.

These are much more economically and resource sound than forcing people to buy much heavier re-usable bags they aren't allowed to re-use.

Some years ago, someone calculated the resource impact of these bags. They found that if you used a typical fabric re-usable bag, you would have to use it 300 times to be less resource intensive than getting one of the single use bags 300 times.

On the other hand, plastic pollution is still a very significant problem - and a truly practical solution is yet to be found.

On the third hand, all that plastic is sequestering a whole lot of carbon that might otherwise be in the atmosphere contributing to Global Warming.