What I suggest is that you buy a reusable bag that you can carry around with you. One that wraps up small to fit in your handbag, backpack, car, etc. Take all (alright most, some are handy to be reused as bin bags or carry bags) of your bags to the recycling centre (yes they can be recycled! as can clean, dry soft plastic packaging) and start refusing any bags that come your way.
If you want to go even further, suggest that store owners give out or sell reusable bags along with items: their customers can advertise their store while carrying around a custom reusable bag (the Australian clothing store Supre have cunningly mastered this marketing strategy, because name brand t-shirts are so last decade).
If you are not convinced about the evilness of the plastic bag and will continue to amass them only to throw them away in a never ending cycle of sin, I shall post a few facts so that hopefully your common sense shall find it logical to abandon the temptation of plastic and devote yourself to the reusable shopping bag:
- Approximately 500 nautical miles off the California coast sits a growing"plastic island," a gargantuan patch of floating plastic trash held together by currents stretching across the northern Pacific almost as far as Japan. This "plastic island" is made up of about 7 billion pounds of plastic garbage, and measures about twice the size of Texas. (Yes this does exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch)
- Of 500 000 albatross chicks born each year on Midway Atoll, about 200 000 die of starvation. Adult albatrosses mistake plastic trash for food and end up feeding it to their chicks. (L.A. Times) (also visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc0a4uuI1gY to find out more about this)
- In good circumstances, high-density polyethylene will take more than 20 years to degrade. In less ideal circumstances (land fills or as general refuse), a bag will take more than 1 000 years to degrade.
- The Environmental Protection Agency estimated 3 960 000 tons of plastic bags, sack and wraps were produced in 2008. Of those, 3,570,000 tons (90%) were discarded.
- When plastics break down, they don't biodegrade; they photodegrade. This means the materials break down to smaller fragments which readily soak up toxins. They then contaminate soil, waterways, and animals upon digestion.
- In the statistical breakdown of a 2008 cleanup by the Ocean Conservancy, numbers were kept on 43 different types of refuse. Cigarette butts were the most common. Plastic bags came in second.
So remember: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. It's not for nothing!