Every day, American consumers are offered a simple choice when they are by a store's cashier: "paper or plastic?"  But as VOA's Ted Landphair explains in today's searching for solutions report, some communities are starting to take away that option.

San Francisco, California, has ordered big grocery and drugstore chains to stop passing out the strong, sheer plastic bags, made from petrochemicals.

And the city council in Maryland's quaint capital plans to vote on an even stronger measure come October.

Sam Shropshire

There, fish and waterfowl sometimes mistake the bags for jellyfish.

Plastics are harmful to fish and waterfowl

Grocery store clerk: "Hi. Would you like paper or plastic?"
Tousaan Jones, customer: "Plastic."

These days, nine out of 10 American shoppers prefer plastic over paper.

San Francisco concluded that plastic bags take hundreds of years to degrade in a landfill.  But in the here and now, Tousaan Jones likes how they stretch, are easy to carry, and do not fall apart in the rain. "I think that the older people prefer to use the paper bags, because it was what they were used to."

Older people, like Seymour Alloy. "To me, it's an absolute.  A store that doesn't give the option of paper bags is not a store that I would go to, except in extremism."

Barry Scher is a vice president of the big Giant Foods grocery chain.

Barry Scher

On one thing, grocer Scher and Alderman Shropshire agree:  The ideal choice would be re-usable totes like shoppers around the world take back and forth to market.

So, there's a lot more at stake than the simple question of "paper or plastic."