Plastic bags are killing us

The most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, the lowly plastic bag is an environmental scourge like none other, sapping the life out of our oceans and thwarting our attempts to recycle it.

Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they’ve been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It’s equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil. …
Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide.

The bags look like jellyfish to a lot of marine life. The bags that don’t get “eaten” become part of the flotsam that now clogs every square inch of the world’s now fully plastinated oceans (some sections of ocean now carry 6x more plastic than biomass).

More than a million birds, animals and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
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In Mumbai in 2005 India experienced massive monsoon flooding partially as a result of drains blocked by plastic bags, resulting in over 1000 deaths.
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Similar flooding happened in 1988 in Bangladesh, which led to the banning of plastic bags in 2002.

Is Education The way Out? - 
The answer to polythene pollution, even if it isn't a complete answer, is education. It's admittedly a hard road to take to try to educate people to stop using something that is so very convenient, and from the perspective of the single individual, polythene doesn't seem to be all that harmful. None of us particularity likes to be told by our government what we can or can't do, and even have a tendency to rebel when something becomes mandatory. Education on the other hand can help people to understand the benefits we all will gain from not using or discarding polythene. If an outright ban isn't in the cards, at least people, on a global scale, might be able to learn to use these products responsibly.