It will spend the rest of its life in a landfill — assuming the landfill can contain it — fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic over hundreds of years. Bags became a target ...

It’s all about a fight over plastic pollution, a problem that has grown to epic proportions since the 1950s. Thin, single-use plastic bags were first developed in the 1960s in Europe.

In fact, eight states have gone so far as to ban single-use plastic bags, and over 200 counties and municipalities have enacted ordinances either imposing a fee on plastic bags or banning them.

Because thicker bags contain more plastic, switching over to them actually increases plastic waste if too many consumers simply treat them as disposable. Charging customers for checkout bags was ...