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  For an industry that's taken plenty of knocks throughout its history, plastics manufacturers were surprisingly slow to respond to the growing anti-bag phenomenon. Bag makers based in California had recognized since the early 2000s that serious trouble was brewing. They could see that the marine-debris issue had very long legs and that sooner or later those legs would start kicking the hell out of their industry. Many actually shared environmentalists' concerns about the plastic vortex and wanted to address what role bags and other plastic products played in creating the problem. They tracked the bag bans and fees being enacted in other countries and watched with alarm the emergence of groups like Southern California's Campaign Against the Plastic Plague, which aimed to eradicate not just plastic grocery bags but all single-use plastic packaging. "This is not a wacko group whose ideas can be shrugged off," the California bag makers warned in their newsletter.

  But the American Chemistry Council, the Washington, D.C., voice of the petrochemical industry, seemed oblivious to the growing public concern over marine debris. (Well, not entirely oblivious. In 2004, a spokesman for the group commandeered the Web address, plasticdebris.org, that the California Coastal Commission had hoped to use for a campaign on marine debris.) The ACC could take comfort in industry polls showing that most manufacturers considered the issues roiling California to be irrelevant outside of that state.

  "Our industry has been really slow in picking up on the ocean debris problem," said Robert Bateman, a bag manufacturer in Oroville, California, when I visited him a few months after San Francisco enacted its ban. His company makes heavier-gauge bags than the grocery-store giveaways, so he wasn't personally affected by the push to eradicate T-shirt bags. But the growing antiplastics fervor was frustrating to him since he considered polyethylene a far more earth-friendly material than paper. He'd been predicting a backlash against bags for many years, ever since he first started hearing reports about plastic trash washing up on beaches in the early 1990s. He'd worked with Charles Moore to develop environmental standards for containing plastic pellets and had long pressed the big trade groups to start addressing the issue of marine debris, not just for business reasons but for ethical ones as well. "My family was in the asbestos business," he explained. "We learned the hard way that not facing up to issues is not the best way."

  The fragmented nature of the industry may partly account for its inability to appreciate Bateman's alarms. The plastics industry is less a unitary world than a collection of planets in their own distinct orbits. The huge, multinational petrochemical companies that make plastic resins operate in a separate realm from the mostly domestic companies that make plastic products. Historically, each group has had its own trade association, conferences, business issues, and political agendas. The resin makers are represented by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), an immensely wealthy trade group with annual revenues of more than $120 million, a staff of 125, four satellite offices, and a roster of issues that reaches far beyond plastics. The products and equipment manufacturers rely on the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI), a smaller outfit with an operating budget less than a tenth the size of the ACC and a staff of fewer than forty. In the past, the SPI was plastic's prime defender, but in recent years, the group has focused mainly on trade issues and left it to the ACC to serve as the voice of plastics on high-profile issues. Until recently, bad blood between the two groups kept them from cooperating.

  Likewise, the world of manufacturers is fractured along provincial lines, with little sense of shared community between, say, a company that injection-molds car parts and one that extrudes grocery bags. So other sectors of the industry didn't feel threatened in the same way that the bag makers did. "We weren't getting any support from the broader industry groups because their ox wasn't getting gored," said Seanor, the Mobil executive who helped introduce the T-shirt bag to America. T-shirt bags may be a hugely visible plastic product, but they make up a minuscule fraction of the plastics business—about $1.2 billion of the $374 billion American plastics market. Why would the rest of the industry rally behind such a flimsy flag?

  It wasn't until San Francisco began developing its bag-fee proposal that the major national T-shirt-bag manufacturers—all of whom were based outside of California—finally sat up and took notice. "We said, 'This will not be good for us,'" recalled Seanor. He and Vanguard cofounder Larry Johnson tried appealing for help to the SPI but were rebuffed. Realizing they had to take matters into their own hands, they called a meeting of the country's five biggest T-shirt-bag manufacturers, inviting them all to gather at the American Airlines Admirals Club lounge in the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. Attending were executives from Interplast in New Jersey, API in New Orleans, Sunoco in Philadelphia, Superbag in Houston, Vanguard in Dallas, and a gaggle of lawyers. Each company agreed to kick in money to hire a lobbyist and develop a pro-bag campaign. The first year's funding totaled about $500,000, though in later years, various of the companies contributed more.

  For the next two years Johnson and other bag executives traveled around the state of California trying their damnedest to quell the rising antiplastics tide. The effort was a full-time job for Johnson until he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2007. The group thought it had bought the bag industry some time by securing passage of the state law requiring grocery stores to recycle bags. But that backfired when San Francisco responded with its ban, triggering a wave of like-minded measures. It had taken years for the industry to beat out paper in the packaging market, and now that hard-won dominance was in danger of disappearing.

  What's more, bags weren't the only plastic product coming under fire. In 2008 alone, some four hundred pieces of plastics-related legislation were introduced at the local, state, and federal levels, including proposed bans on polystyrene fast-food packaging, phthalate-laden toys, and bisphenol A-containing baby bottles, and even one proposal to classify preproduction pellets as hazardous substances. Plastics had never before come under attack on so many different fronts. "We are at the tipping point," SPI president William Carteaux warned thousands of industry members gathered for the group's big annual meeting in 2009. "Legislation and regulation threaten to fundamentally change our business model ... We can't continue to fight back just at the reactive stage when things are emotionally charged. We have to take the offensive and react quicker." Industrywide, people were realizing it was time to get serious.

  Ironically, by focusing their bans on plastic bags alone, anti-bag activists had unintentionally handed the plastics industry one of its most potent weapons. For the inevitable result of banning plastic bags was that grocers would revert to distributing ones made from paper. Consumption of paper bags shot up more than fourfold to eighty-five million annually in San Francisco following the ban. As some environmentalists already knew—and others would quickly learn—this wasn't doing Mother Nature any favors.

  "Paper bags are terrible. Terrible!" exclaimed Stephen Joseph, a Bay Area lawyer representing California bag makers in their fight against cities banning plastic bags.

  Joseph is an unlikely crusader for plastics. He's a liberal independent who "hates Republicans," an environmentalist who despises litter, and someone with no prior connection to the plastic industry. He's a contrarian by nature and a litigator by training. But Joseph said his true calling is being "a campaigner," a locution that probably reflects his upbringing in England. "I love fighting for a cause," he explained. He may serve as a gun for hire, but, he insisted, only for those causes that he could sincerely endorse.

  Now in his fifties, Joseph is an imposing figure with salt-and-pepper hair, a high forehead, a long nose, and an irrepressible pugnacious streak. He's enjoyed prior success as a campaigner, most famously when he decided to challenge the food industry's use of trans fats. His stepfather died of a heart attack, and Joseph was shocked to discover that his diet might have been what killed him, so he went on the warpath. His stroke of genius was a 2003 lawsuit to block Kraft Foods from selling Oreo cookies to children on t
he grounds that they were full of artery-clogging trans fats. The suit generated hostile headlines; Jay Leno and Dave Letterman poked fun at it, and the Wall Street Journal called him "the cookie monster." Still, he got the last laugh. Two weeks after Joseph filed suit, Kraft announced it was removing the offending fats. He later ran a successful campaign to make all the restaurants in his hometown of Tiburon trans fat free. Other cities in the country have since followed that lead.

  Joseph's success caught the eye of some California bag makers. A man who could win public sympathy with a campaign against Oreo cookies was a man who knew how to champion an unpopular cause. But when they tried to hire him, Joseph turned them down. Then he came across a news article in the London Times debunking one of the most commonly cited indictments against plastic bags—that they kill a hundred thousand marine animals a year. As the Times discovered, that figure was a misrepresentation of a Canadian study that had implicated discarded fishing nets, not bags, in the deaths of Alaskan seals. "I began digging, thinking if that was a lie, what else was?" Stephens said. The more research he did, the more he became convinced that in the case of plastic vs. paper, plastic was getting an unfair rap. Now he's fighting with a convert's zeal. With his typical in-your-face style, he called his campaign the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition. With atypical reticence, he refused to name the coalition's members.

  Joseph can cite chapter and verse from the numerous studies that have shown plastic carries a lesser environmental impact than paper. Life-cycle analyses—studies that analyze a product's cradle-to-grave environmental impact—have consistently found that, compared to paper bags, plastic bags take significantly less energy and water to produce, require less energy to transport, and emit half as many greenhouse gases in their production. Author Tom Robbins called the paper bag "the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature," but that's true only if you ignore the tree-felling, chemical-pulping, intensive-bleaching, water-sucking industrial production that goes into making that natural, potato-skin feel of a brown paper bag. In reality, it's no more natural than its crinkly polyethylene counterpart (though it typically will contain more recycled content). If your top environmental concerns are energy conservation and climate change, plastic is unquestionably a greener choice than paper.

  However, life-cycle analyses don't tell the whole story. They do best measuring energy-related impacts, but they have trouble with less easily quantified issues, such as litter and marine debris, the toxicity of materials, and impacts on wildlife.

  Perhaps more to the point, data-driven comparisons don't speak to our feelings about the two materials—our irrational sense of comfort with the feel of paper bags and our sense of discomfort with plastic's preternatural endurance. The presence of plastic where it doesn't belong—matter out of place—pisses people off. This became very apparent when I accompanied Joseph to a 2008 public hearing on a plastic-bag ban proposed by Manhattan Beach, a small, upscale suburb of Los Angeles that's perched on a hill and overlooks a spectacular stretch of ocean. The town is fairly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but everyone there cherishes the beaches—there are more surfers per household than just about anywhere else in California.

  Joseph and I arrived early. Even though we weren't dressed for the beach—we were both in suits and carting luggage—Joseph suggested we stroll down to check it out. "Do you see any bags?" he kept asking as we walked along. And he was right—most of the litter we saw consisted of cigarette butts, soda cans, and paper trash. "Gorgeous, isn't it ... Where are the bags?" Joseph said, staring out over the neatly raked stretch of white sand, either ignoring the fact or unaware that county trucks rake the beaches clean of debris every day.

  Like other defenders of plastic bags, Joseph maintained that bag litter wasn't a product problem but a behavioral one: bags don't litter; people do. And as such, he insisted, it made no sense to attack the product for the way it was misused. He pointed to two pizza boxes scrunched up on the sidewalk. "Are we going to ban pizza now?"

  Yet Joseph's arguments got no traction in the standing-room-only council meeting that night. No one cared if plastic bags were less pernicious for marine life than abandoned nets or that making them produced fewer greenhouse gases than making paper bags, or that city staff had not thoroughly analyzed the environmental impacts of shifting to paper bags. As one activist testified, "This isn't about global warming. It's about the Santa Monica Bay." Supporters of the measure had two priorities: protecting the area's precious coastline and moving the city away from the use of disposable bags of any kind. Council members said they were starting with plastic bags but hoped eventually to take on paper bags as well. "This is not about the transition from plastic to paper. It's about the transition from plastic and paper to reusable bags," said one. "Changing human behavior takes time."

  Every member of the council favored the ban. The minute the last vote was recorded, Joseph turned to me and said, "Lawsuit!"

  The fact that paper bags would become the default choice in the city's stores gave Joseph solid grounds for that lawsuit and a winning case in court. He argued—and both a trial court and an appeals court have agreed—that the ban violated a state law that requires cities to prepare a study of the possible adverse environmental consequences of proposed laws. That a pro-environmental regulation could be used to defeat a law aimed at protecting the environment was, one commentator suggested, the legal equivalent of "karma's a bitch."

  Throughout California, such lawsuits, or threats of lawsuits, slowed the local drives to outlaw plastic bags, forcing at least a dozen cities—including Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Jose—to back off ban proposals and even withdraw enacted laws. The $50,000 to $250,000 required to prepare a full environmental-impact report is a high barrier for cash-strapped California municipalities. But eventually a group of cities decided to pitch in and pay for a report they all could share. When it was completed, in early 2010, it confirmed what Joseph had been saying all along: paper bags carry many more severe environmental impacts than plastic.

  That finding was surprising to some plastic-bag-ban advocates, including Carol Misseldine, director of Green Cities California, the group that commissioned the report. It didn't temper her distaste for plastic bags, but it drove home how the political debate had gone off track: the issue isn't really plastic or paper, she said, but the habit of carrying groceries and other merchandise home in bags designed to be used just one time. "Single-use products have extraordinary environmental impacts in manufacturing, processing, and disposal," she said. "We have to get back to a mindset that relies on durable products."

  Roger Bernstein of the American Chemistry Council has understood that all along. He recognizes that the plastic-versus-paper fights are sideshows; the real threat to the industry is the battle against single-use products, the drive to replace disposables with reusables. The push for bans and fees are being driven by "a pure expression of the zero-waste ethic, and total non-choice about reusable bags is the end game," he said disdainfully. "Everything needs to be reused!" Bernstein is vice president for state and legislative affairs for the ACC, which has increasingly taken on the role of chief lobbyist for the plastic bag. I met with him and other ACC representatives at their headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, shortly before the group moved to a new state-of-the-art-green, LEED-certified building closer to Capitol Hill.

  Bernstein, in his sixties, is a slight, sharp-featured man with a thick thatch of gray hair and brown eyes magnified behind his glasses. He's been a backroom warrior for the industry for more than thirty years. A former journalist, he started at the Society of the Plastics Industry, then moved to the American Plastics Council, a group formed by major resin makers in the late 1980s, and then joined the ACC when it merged with the Plastics Council in 2000. The ACC had kept its distance from the bag battle, but it took up the fight in early 2008 when the bag makers became overwhelmed by the blizzard of anti-bag measures. The ACC clearly hoped to prevent the furor over
bags from snowballing into broader anti-plastics initiatives.

  Bernstein divides the politics of plastic into "fear issues" and "guilt issues." Fear issues, he said, are the ones concerned with "environmental self-protection" or with safety questions such as the debate over the potential health risks of bisphenol A. "You have to address those with all the information you can bring to bear on [the chemical's] safety," ideally from third-party sources that will be considered more credible than the industry itself. To that end, the industry has sponsored research studies on suspect chemicals, studies that have a striking tendency to produce results showing the chemicals in question are safe far more often than those conducted by independent researchers do. Bernstein called it delivering information; critics called it sowing doubt.

  Plastic bags don't arouse fear, but, as Bernstein recognized, they do play on people's sense of guilt about consumption and the wastefulness of throwaway products. The answer to that is to give people ways to feel all right about single-use plastic products. That means public relations campaigns to remind people about the benefits of plastics and industry-sponsored bills and programs that promote recycling, which he called "a guilt eraser." Recycling assures people that plastic isn't just an infernal hanger-on; it has a useful afterlife. "As soon as they recycle your product," he explained, "they feel better about it." Then they don't want to ban it.