My local supermarket recently introduced a tote bag that was fashioned from recycled plastic bags.

They are light, strong and stylish – a basic black with a discreet logo and they only cost 99 cents each. I now have about seven of them and I use them constantly. I still accept plastic bags to use as garbage liners but I secretly wish for an alternative.

Off the top of my head I would estimate that my use of plastic bags has declined by 60 to 70 percent.

In Asia, where I once spent a lot time, I witnessed the damage of the ubiquitous plastic bag.

Once beautiful rows of hedges and trees would suddenly become festooned with clinging bags in even the mildest wind. Plastic bags would clog sewers and create shiny lakes of water colored with white and pale blue plastic bags in the lightest of rains.

In any major Asian city there are street drink vendors on most street corners. They offer relief from the heat and humidity with a wide choice of all the canned common soft drinks of Coke, Pepsi, Orange Crush and more. Order one and what you get is your drink, with ice and a straw neatly tied into a plastic bag.

The vendor keeps the can which he will later resell to a recycler.

It is that same plastic bag that is choking off plant life and sewage systems.

The Chinese refer to plastic bags as the “white pollution,” in South Africa it is sarcastically dubbed as being the “national flower.”

It seems that plastic bags have always been an integral part of life but in reality they only became popular and available in the mid nineties. It has just been over a decade since their introduction but we now use between 500 billion to 1 trillion bags every year worldwide.

And they are everywhere.

In the early nineties I was aboard a small Cambodian Naval coastal vessel sailing in remote waters when suddenly the Captain veered the boat hard to the right. We just missed a patch of plastic waste, bags, saran wrap type wrappers and surprisingly condoms, all floating by like a giant raft of refuse the size of the football field.

I later discovered that over 100 thousand whales, seals, turtles and other marine wildlife die as a result of their encounter with plastic products. That estimate seems somehow oddly low.

Ireland introduced a tax on plastic bags in March of 2002. If you wanted a plastic bag from your local shopkeeper it would cost you 20 cents. Almost overnight the use of basic bags dropped by 90 percent and for those that were willing to pay the price for plastic found themselves contributing millions of dollars of tax money for recycling programs.

Else where when similar inciatives were introduced – South Africa, Australia, Taiwan and other nations and the general public has met the challenge without so much as a whimper.

In my city the concept to convince shoppers to use tote bags and shun plastic has come from retailers, not the local government. Once again public policy lags way behind public environmental interests and concerns.

By the way. Those stylish black tote bags that I now use daily were made from recycled plastic shopping bags - in China.