Paying for plastic bags - not a solution

Toronto will be implementing a law that requires grocery retailers to charge $0.05 for a plastic bag to take home groceries. The idea is to encourage people to bring reusable bags and therefore reduce the number of plastic bags being thrown away.

Now, for a little background on my opinion before I actually express my thoughts on this.
I have been anti-plastic bags for a really long time. I definitely remember having conversations with one of my classmates in University (about 8 years ago) about how wasteful I think they are and how we agreed that it was important to try, as much as possible, to "just say no" when shopping for anything. Now I also remember some time after that, I met that friend again at his house and the discussion somehow led to plastic bags again and he said that he no longer was so against them, because he actually needed some for the green bin program that really did help reduce the amount of actual garbage going to landfills.

So, at this point in my life, I live in a condo and, unfortunately, I need plastic bags to throw away my garbage. Every week, I shop at Loblaws for our grocery needs (especially in the winter with no farmer's markets around). I bring our trusty grocery bin and 1 reusable cloth bag. The bin is awesome. It's about the size of the hand-held baskets you can use at grocery stores and holds 4-8 plastic bags worth of stuff (depending on what you're buying). If you don't believe this, just think about the times that you've gone shopping and how much you are able to fit in the handheld basket and then how many bags you end up with when you go to checkout. But I digress - the point is, I do use reusable bags/bins for my groceries, but I always try and pack one or two things (especially meat) in a plastic bag, so that I will have them for my garbage bin at home, which I dispose of almost daily. Somehow, another 4-6 plastic bags find their way into my house on a weekly basis, which is why I only take one or two at the grocery store. This is much better than the "bag of bags" that I think most of us have sitting in our homes, or worse, just being thrown directly in the garbage.

If grocery stores and others start charging for plastic bags, people will still need them. And so instead of getting them for free, we are now being taxed for a necessity. Now, I'm not saying that I support plastic bags, but I don't think that this new proposal is the right solution. It's just that my only choices right now are:

• pay 5 cents for plastic bags at my grocery store -->still ends up in landfill
• buy a big box of plastic bags from my grocery store, or other retailer for less than 5 cents/bag, which will probably be more heavy-duty plastic -->still ends up in landfill
• buy "biodegradable" plastic bags from whatever retailer -->made from corn or other vegetation that should be feeding people, not our bad habits (although, i've heard that these bags start deteriorating almost immediately if they get wet, so it almost defeats the purpose of putting your garbage in "a bag")

I don't have the right solution, and I am not going to propose any** because anything that we can do right now is just too difficult to implement on a mass-scale, but the policy-makers out there have to realize that they haven't got it right yet, and they need to continue to think of a better plan. Someone needs to do some root-causing and address that. It won't be easy, but we need to work towards it. If we consider this a small step towards that ultimate solution then this is okay, but if this is politicians patting each other on the back and calling it a day, then this should be an indication of why most people don't have very nice things to say about Governments.

**p.s. okay fine, the best solution I can think of right now is to have consumers pay 5-10 cents for a biodegradeable bag - but there are so many flaws with this solution that I know that something better must exist.