In doing research for the Back to the Sack project, I have been running across a wide variety of arguments against banning plastic bags. The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article about the dangers of reusable shopping bags. And on Oct 7th, 2008, amid fears of our economic crisis, Savetheplasticbag.com published a press release announcing that “Banning plastic bags means banning 4,000 American manufacturing jobs and indirectly causing many more job losses.”

I don’t think this is a valid argument against banning plastic bags (though I do think it is a good argument for manufacturing reusable bags in the United States). Mostly, I am just amazed that I can find websites that are purely dedicated to explaining why we should NOT ban plastic bags, but the information promoting a ban and/or tax on plastic bags is scattered here and there on environmental websites. I think we need to review these pro-plastic bag websites and pull together a clear argument of why plastic bags need to be banned and/or taxed while debunking these kinds of claims.