Paper or Plastic?

Neither.

TAKE A WALK along the Chesapeake Bay or the Anacostia River, and you are likely to see plastic bags floating in the water. Ever since these now ubiquitous symbols of American super-consumption showed up in supermarkets and the words "paper or plastic" became a fixture in Americans' lexicon, plastic shopping bags have made their way into local waterways and, from there, into the bay, where they can harm wildlife. Piles of them -- the material takes centuries to decompose -- show up in landfills, in otherwise verdant rural landscapes and on city streets. Plastic bags also take an environmental toll in the form of millions of barrels of oil expended every year to produce them.

Enter Annapolis Alderman Sam Shropshire (D-Ward 7), who has introduced a well-meaning proposal to ban retailers from distributing plastic shopping bags in Maryland's capital. Instead, retailers would be required to offer bags made of recycled paper and to sell reusable bags. The city of Baltimore is considering a similar measure. The problem, opponents of the idea counter, is that paper bags are harmful, too: They cost more to make, they gobble up more resources to transport, and recycling them causes more pollution than recycling plastic. The argument for depriving Annapolis residents of their plastic bags is far from made.

Everyone in this debate is right about one thing: Disposable shopping bags of any type are wasteful, and the best outcome would be for customers to reuse bags instead. Annapolis's mayor is investigating how to hand out free, reusable shopping bags to city residents, a proposal that can proceed regardless of whether other bags are banned. A less-expensive strategy would be to encourage retailers to give discounts to customers who bring their own, reusable bags, a policy that a spokesman for Giant Food says the supermarket chain already has in place. And this tack would be more effective if stores imitated furniture mega-retailer Ikea and charged for disposable bags at the checkout counter.

A broad ban that would merely replace some forms of pollution with others is not the answer.