"Plastics" was the word a character actor so famously advised Dustin Hoffman's character in "The Graduate" to pursue as he began his adult life.

And certainly, few substances have infiltrated our lifestyle and, unfortunately, our bloodstream quite so quickly or so thoroughly as plastic.

But the benefits of plastic -- arterial stints, electronics, and a whole host of things the American Chemistry Council would have you remember -- are outweighed by the thing that makes it so valuable: it lasts forever.

It is this aspect of plastic bags which makes them such a pariah in environmental circles. Used for 10 or 30 minutes, they live in landfills for hundreds if not thousands of years, according to some estimates.

Personally, I hate them, but nonetheless find them everywhere in my life and bring them religiously to the Giant for recycling where I fervently hope they actually get recycled.

They so often break, or spill that I find them useless and was pleased to see that Giant is now offering canvas bags for sale for $1. I bought several.

But there's at least one place in America that has gone a step further.

In Seattle, the city which stopped using bottled water at all its city offices, the city council passed a 20 cent tax on plastic and paper bags in July, trying to convince shoppers to bring their own bags to the store.

According to this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ever since the ordinance was passed, to take effect in January, the city has been contacted by the administration of 19 other cities, which all wanted copies of the law.

Even more worrisome to the American Chemistry Council is a similar state-wide tax being considered in California.

This is a fine example of what Robert Kennedy Jr., who spoke last year at The Hill School, calls the invisible subsidy the world provides to industry. They make a product, but make no provision for its disposal, a cost society absorbs. It's true of everything from air pollution to, well, plastic bags.

But the chemical industry folks are not taking this sudden awareness and call to action lying down.

In yet another example of the best community activism money can buy, the ACC used paid signature takers and in 11 days collected enough signatures to put the matter up to Seattle voters.

The slick-sounding Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax, argues, through it's paid spokesman, that the tax is "placing an unfair financial burden on Seattle's working families."

"I thought this was going to be a local waste-reduction effort, and it turns out that we are going head-to-head with these monsters of industry, these guys are crippling our efforts to clean up our environment," Ellie Rose, a member of the unpaid Seattle group Bring Your Own Bag, told the PI.

The plastics spokesman, who works for an Arlington. Va., P.R. firm, wants "voluntary incentives," but as someone who watched the folks at the check-out frequently forget to give credit my bill the 1 cent off I was supposed to receive for bringing my own bags, I think Seattle may be on the right track.

Government intervention on this issue is not as unheard of as the American Chemistry Council would have you believe.

In January 2002, the South African government required manufacturers to make plastic bags more durable and more expensive to discourage their disposal—prompting a 90-percent reduction in use.

Ireland instituted a 15-cent-per-bag tax in March 2002, which led to a 95-percent reduction in use.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom also have plans to ban or tax plastic bags.

According to this page at Worldwatch Institute, which is dedicated to "a sustainable world," "plastic bags start as crude oil, natural gas, or other petrochemical derivatives, which are transformed into chains of hydrogen and carbon molecules known as polymers or polymer resin. After being heated, shaped, and cooled, the plastic is ready to be flattened, sealed, punched, or printed on."

North America and Western Europe account for nearly 80 percent of plastic bag use—though the bags are increasingly common in developing countries as well. Factories around the world churned out a whopping four to five trillion of them in 2002

Each year, Americans throw away some 100 billion polyethylene plastic bags. (Only 0.6 percent of plastic bags are recycled.)

Plastic bags are so light and so compactable, if not compostable, that the amount of landfill space they take up and the amount of tonnage they take up is insignificant in the grander scheme of things.

But one of their primary downsides is that, as we all know, many of them don't end up in landfills at all but end up blowing through the air and into storm drains and our yards. (My hedge is an excellent collector).

According to this June article in The New York Times Magazine, "on the shores of Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic, the survey found on average a plastic item every five meters. "

Worse, "in 2002, Nature magazine reported that during the 1990s, debris in the waters near Britain doubled; in the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica the increase was a hundredfold. And depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today’s marine debris is made of plastic.

Plastic gets into the ocean when people throw it from ships or leave it in the path of an incoming tide, but also when rivers carry it there, or when sewage systems and storm drains overflow.

Several months ago, I was home late on night after deadline and happened upon a National Geographic documentary titled "Strange Days on Planet Earth."

Narrated by Edward Norton, the film highlighted a patch of floating trash the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean whose currents bring and keep there, outside common shipping lanes, but smack in the middle of the feeding grounds of Albatross who end of dying of hunger, their stomachs filled with plastic they mistook for jellyfish.

Seeing a skeleton of a bird, it's entire rib cage stuffed with bits of plastic knowing it starved because there was no room in its stomach for actual food, should make anyone think twice about the cost of that 10 minutes of convenience.