In America there are tight regulations of the manufacturing, and transport on top of EPA. When you request a plastic bag, it's clean and it's fate is clean, plus we have profuse kandfill space available that is also tightly managed and regulated.
It is the "emerging" economies led by China and India who dump unregulated waste including heavy metals and other toxins, have dirty-technolgy, and unregulated factories that spew millions of tons of untreated air pollution and who also dump millions of tons of their plastic garbage directly into our oceans.
So you jackass hipsters at Trader Joe's keep using your filthy little burlap bags and thinking that you're making a difference while you turn a blind eye to the ecological atrocities committed by your we-are-the-world brothers.
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh