This comes from reason.org, which immediately should raise everyone's suspicions, but it's pretty well written and organized. We can evaluate it ourselves, and

This comes from reason.org, which immediately should raise everyone's suspicions, but it's pretty well written and organized. We can evaluate it ourselves, and since I find my city's ban pretty annoying, I thought "Why not?". Section 2.1 disagrees with the notion that plastic bags consume lots of natural resources by quoting someone who claims that they consume a lot of oil, and disagreeing with him, saying that they are made from mostly natural gas. This is just silly: technically they're not wrong, but their argument is only compelling if you for some reason believe that natural gas is a less valuable resource than oil. Section 2.2 starts off well, citing a study saying that HDPE bags aren't actually that big a component of litter overall. Point in favor there. They also cited the same study to demonstrate that plastic bags aren't that big of a storm drain problem. It goes downhill from there: the section on the marine ecosystem basically consists of them disagreeing with more reliable sources without actually citing any evidence. Then, it for some reason goes into a discussion of the Pacific garbage island, which seems irrelevant. That section turns around at the end, proposing a better way to reduce litter and citing a successful example of such a program. Section 2.3, on whether or not restrictions on HDPE bags actually reduce waste. The first section establishes that plastic bags aren't that big a fraction of landfill waste: This is the beginning of a good argument, but to complete the argument they would need to show that bag restrictions have cost larger than that small benefit, and they did not do this. Landfill decomposition: This is a good argument, +1 point here. Section 2.4, Global Climate: The life cycle analysis in section 3 does a good job of supporting the argument that plastic bags don't significantly contribute to climate change. Section 4 cites various anecdotes about the long term effectiveness of bag restrictions. There are only six such examples cited. That suggests cherry picking, since there were many more such examples even two years ago. This section does also reiterate the previous good argument that an effective plastic bag ban wouldn't help that much if at all with greenhouse emissions. Further on, in section 4.6, the document tries to make the argument that bag restrictions are expensive, but the numbers they describe seem similarly small to the damage described in section 2.3. While completing the argument, it doesn't actually make it compelling. The health argument is one I've heard a lot, so I won't try to address it here: that argument is all over the place. Overall the document makes some good points, some suspect ones, and some irrelevant ones.