Do you want paper or plastic?

If you have ever gone to a grocery store or any other store in the U.S. for that matter and are on the checkout line, the bag boy/girl or cashier wants to know if I want my groceries to be bagged in a plastic bag or a paper bag. And I carelessly reply that I don’t care about it. So they bag it in a plastic bag. Why? because it is easier to bag and hold the bag and second even if you say paper, that paper bag does not have a handle and it still will have to bagged in a plastic bag since paper bags can burst if there are heavy stuff inside, so what is the use of asking? Because they want people to say that they are environmentally conscious and they want people to have a say. And in my state of New Jersey, they have passed a law that all the groceries will be packed in paper otherwise they will charge us five cents for each bag of groceries, so now the people will just bring their bags to the market to bag their groceries. Is it really environmentally friendlier than the plastic that paper is all hyped to be? Although we all know that it takes more time to decompose a plastic than a paper bag but it would not do that much harm since we will then use maybe two or three paper bags to hold our heavy groceries so that they don’t fall out of the bag. So more bags will be ordered and more trees will be cut to serve this purpose. And since I like plastic better than paper so I will always favor plastic because it has a handle and sturdier than paper. So there should not be any specific law to ban one item or the other, let the people decide.