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Around the world, countries, cities and towns have jumped on the anti-plastic bandwagon. Last year San Francisco became the first city in the US to ban plastic bags outright, and the small town of Modbury in the UK gained much publicity when it followed suit.

In January this year, China - the world's most populous nation that uses about three billion plastic bags a day - announced that it banned free plastic bags from shops by June 2008. Meanwhile, super-thin plastic bags have already been banned.

Of course, the war on plastic bags in Australia is not a new one. Calls for a levy on supermarket bags were first heard in 2002, and on Anzac Day this year, the town of Coles Bay in Tasmania celebrated five years of being plastic bag free.

However, in recent months Australian environmental groups have stepped up their campaign to rid the streets of plastic bags.

They have the support of Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett, who, shortly after taking up office, declared his intention to phase out plastic shopping bags from the nation's supermarkets by the end of the year. They also have the support of many consumers who see plastic bags as a blight on urban and rural landscapes.

"With most people there's a feeling of 'let's just get on with it already'," says Jon Dee, founder of environmental group Planet Ark and the man who, along with Ron Clarke, Mayor of the Gold Coast, is spearheading the 'National Plastic Bag Campaign'.

"We've been talking about a phase-out for nearly six years now and we need to just get on and do it."

But that's easier said than done. For every person who believes that plastic bags are the antithesis of all that is green and good, there is another who argues that banning plastic bags serves only to make consumers feel good about themselves.

This contention reaches the highest levels of government. On April 17 environment ministers came together in Melbourne to discuss the fate of the plastic bags in Australia. The end result reflected the nature of the debate: none of the states could agree on the best way to tackle a ban.

Each state will now enact its own approach, from South Australia's total ban by the end of the year, to Victoria's planned trials for a levy.

The one thing the states could agree on is that we need to wean ourselves off plastics bags. But are they really that evil? Would getting rid of them be the answer to our waste woes?

The trouble with plastic

Plastic shopping bags were first introduced to Australian supermarkets in the 1980s. Cheap to produce, lightweight, waterproof and convenient, they quickly became indispensable to both shopkeeper and shopper.

So much so that despite the voluntary phase out that began in 2002, a recently leaked draft report for the Federal Government showed that Australians used a whopping 4.84 billion plastic bags in 2007 alone. This is nearly one billion more bags than the previous year.

"It shows that the voluntary approach for banning plastic bags has been a total failure," says Dee. "Australians have used more than 25 billion plastic bags since the voluntary phase out began and at the end of the day we've made the environment a far worse place."

In addition to being manufactured from non-renewable fossil fuels, plastic bags degrade very, very slowly. According to Clean Up Australia, 3.76 billion plastic bags are sent to landfill sites throughout the country every year.

Estimates on how long it takes a plastic bag to decompose range anywhere from 20 to 400 years, and if they're not disposed of properly, then they can break down into smaller, more toxic constituents which can contaminate soils and waterways.

"And there are many that don't even make it into a landfill," argues Dee. "On a very windy day, even the best managed landfill site will have thousands of plastic bags escaping into the community."

According to a government report published in 2002, 47 per cent of litter that escapes from landfills is wind-borne plastic, and much of this is plastic bags. When released into the environment, they clog up drains and waterways (they were identified as one of the major factors in the Bangladesh floods of 1988 and 1998) and can end up choking and poisoning marine mammals.

"If a turtle gets washed ashore and he's tangled in ropes and nets and his stomach is full of bits of plastic bags and flip flops, and he's old and he's got some scars then it's very difficult to determine what killed it," says Brisbane-based Gilly Llewellyn, Head of the Oceans Program at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

While it's difficult to point to plastic bags as a smoking gun, Llewellyn says they contribute to deaths because they're not part of the animals' natural environment.

"From a conservation perspective we [WWF] see plastic bags in the oceans as additional source of risk for marine mammals that might accidentally ingest them."

But others argue that a call for a ban or levy is just a knee-jerk reaction to eco-bullying.

"The image of a plastic bag around a dolphin's head has created a monster around what is a fully recyclable product," says Mark Jacobson, National Marketing Manager for Repeat Plastics Australia, which recycles plastic bags into everything from commercial jetties and stair treads to sand boxes and garden furniture.

"Don't blame the plastic bag; it's a brilliant, brilliant product. The issue is the way it's handled, disposed of and recycled."

An issue of recycling

Indeed, both high-density polyethylene (HDPE) bags, the kind you find at the supermarket checkout, and low-density polyethylene (LDPE) bags, the thicker, more durable plastic bags used by 'boutique' stores, are both fully recyclable. However, neither HDPE nor LDPE bags can be recycled through kerbside collections.

"The problem is that plastic bags in kerbside recycling tend to contaminate other materials and foul up the equipment used to sort materials," says Nick Harford, General Manager for the Environment at Visy Industries, Australia's largest packaging and recycling company.

Plastic bags must be taken to central recycling collection points such as supermarkets that have specially designated bins. As a result, only two to three per cent of our plastic bags are recycled according to Clean Up Australia.

"And only six to seven per cent get another use by way of bin liners or scooping up dog droppings or putting shoes in when you go travelling," says Ian Kiernan, Chairman of Clean Up Australia. "And then they still end up in landfills and the environment."

The Australian National Retailers Association (ANRA) argues otherwise. In an independent survey commissioned by the group in May last year, figures showed that 93 per cent of respondents reused their plastic shopping bags. Just three per cent said they threw them out.

The alternatives

With support gathering for a plastic bag ban, shoppers and retailers alike have been searching for alternatives. In Australia, the most popular option is the 'Go Green' reusable bag, which has been the choice of eco-conscious consumers since its introduction in 2003. Coles and Woolworths supermarkets have reportedly sold more than 10 million of them.

But are the dark green bags really more environmentally friendly than their throwaway counterparts?

The Centre for Design at Melbourne's RMIT University carried out a cradle-to-grave analysis in 2003 investigating the environmental impacts of both single-use and reusable shopping bags. Reusable bags won hands down.

When comparing factors such as materials, greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion and two litter categories (litter aesthetics and litter in the marine environment and waterways), the impact of reusable bags is much lower across the board.

Karli Verghese, manager for sustainable products, packaging and lifecycle assessment at the RMIT Centre for Design, says what makes reusable bags so much better is the small number used per year, unlike single-use bags.

However, critics argue that the 'Go Green' bags are not as green as they may seem. Because they are made from non-woven polypropylene - derived from a by-product of oil refining - they can't be recycled.

Another alternative is degradable bags. First touted as the replacement to plastic bags in 2002, these bags are made from materials such as cornstarch, starch-polyester blends and other polyesters.

Materials can break down by bacterial (biodegradable), thermal (oxidative) or ultraviolet (photodegradable) action. So, given the right conditions, degradable bags should break down quickly and leave no visible trace, nor any toxic residue. But this is where the main problem lies.

"The thing with a degradable bag is that if it's not disposed of in the correct environment then it will sit there as long as an HDPE bag," says Verghese. "If it needs sun [to break it down] and it ends up in a landfill, then it's never going to degrade. If it needs bacteria to break it down but it ends up in water then it won't degrade. So rather than solve a problem, you've caused another problem somewhere else in the chain."

Finally, there's paper. The 'Are You Ready?' website, which was launched by Jon Dee and Ron Clarke to get the public prepared for the plastic bag phase-out, advocates paper bags as an alternative to plastic and degradable bags.

"My argument is that while reusable bags are the way to go, paper bags are a partial alternative," says Dee. "Paper bags have a number of benefits: they can be made sustainably, you can put them in the recycling bin and you don't have the problem of windborne contamination. A paper bag doesn't last hundreds of years; if it ends up in the water it weakens and starts to fall apart within a day. You never hear stories of turtles and whales being killed by paper bags."

The science would disagree with Dee, however, with the RMIT's report putting paper on a par with degradable plastic at the end of its life and far more resource and greenhouse intensive to produce. Paper bags are often also given a bad environmental wrap because of the need to chop down trees for their manufacture.

It is unlikely the issues surrounding plastic bags will be resolved quickly. However, what is certain is that Australia - and the rest of the world - uses far too many of them far too readily.