IME these discussions are almost always driven by people that drive to the grocery store once a week to do their shopping and can't imagine life any other way.

IME these discussions are almost always driven by people that drive to the grocery store once a week to do their shopping and can't imagine life any other way. Then they can get on their high horse against people like us with much lower carbon footprints. Like you I don't know ahead of time whether I'm going to go shopping until I do and my plastic shopping bags become rubbish bags on a nearly 1 to 1 scale. Things like this are usually just feel good measures all around, in the western world most of these bags will end up at rubbish sites and there are a million other sources of plastic waste that get left unaddressed. When they introduced laws against single use plastics here the number of bags used dropped 80%, but the 10c "reusable" ones have a lot more plastic, making it a net wash. And even then when you buy fresh veggies like potatoes and carrots they'll be bundled into a single use bag, either by the shop themselves or the customer. They're are tonnes of ways to cut down plastic and other waste but everyone is preoccupied with this one convenient and hard to avoid use.