I did an hour-long segment on plastic grocery bags today on the Diane Rehm Show, a nationally syndicated NPR program produced by WAMU in Washington, D.C.

The other guests were Sam Shropshire, Alderman from the Seventh Ward in Annapolis, Maryland and sponsor of a bill to ban plastic grocery bags; Donna Dempsey from the too-craftily-named Progressive Bag Alliance; and Barry Scher from the Giant Food supermarket chain.

This is one of those stories where the facts make it pretty hard for industry to make much of a case. America goes through at least 30 billion plastic grocery bags each year. Donna and Barry go to great pains explaining that the bags are fully recyclable. But in practice the recycling rate is between one and four percent. Which means somewhere between 96 and 99 percent wind up as waste.

Because the bags are so thin and light, they tend to cause problems when they get into the mixed recycling stream. We go through about 12 million barrels of oil a year making these things, which wind up in trees, incinerators and down the gullets of both livestock and wildlife.

Salon had a nice piece last week (hyperbolic headline notwithstanding).

As consumers become more aware of the tradeoffs, interest in alternatives has skyrocketed. Earlier this year San Francisco moved to ban non-recyclable plastic bags altogether; other communities are looking to follow suit. Retailers like Whole Foods have dropped plastic altogether, while Ikea and others are now charging customers by the bag.

The interesting thing about today's radio discussion what how much sense the industry folks made so long as they acknowledged the problem and sounded like they were actually interested in fixing it. In fact, it sounds like Giant could make some legitimate progress if they cranked up their attempts a bit.

But it went off the rails for both Dempsey and Scher whenver they started falling back on talking points that were designed to minimize or dismiss the reality that we all need a better way to get our groceries home. And at times both of them were way too willing to blame consumers – their consumers.

Paper bags have their own problems, of course. In most cases, the customer has know way of knowing whether the sacks they are using come from sustainably harvested or recycled sources. Ultimately the best bag is the one you don't have to use at all, or which you can use over and over again.

Very few people living in modern society – or in the developing world, for that matter, where these bags are also ubiquitous – are going to never use a plastic bag again. But imagine if everyone cut back by half. Or even a quarter. That's a lot of plastic that won't wind up stuck in your neighbor's hedge, or in the belly of a sea turtle.