For a growing number of people, the humble plastic bag has become an unnecessary evil that must be stopped.

Discarded carrier bags litter our towns and countryside, they kill wildlife and hang around in the environment for decades.

Landfill operators dislike them for their annoying habit of being blown away from their intended burial site.

The only people who have a good word to say about them are those in the plastic-bag industry.

Big surprise, you might say, but in fact, the industry's arguments do make some sense.

Objectively, plastic bags are nowhere near the world’s worst environmental problem.

The reason they are being picked on, the industry claims, is because they are an easy and emotive target.

Like it or not, the plastic bag has become a part of our lives, and today most people around the world don’t use anything else to carry their shopping in.

Depending on who is asked, the UK gets through somewhere between 9 billion and 17 billion plastic bags a year.

Globally, we carry home between 500 billion and a trillion annually, which is 150 bags a year for every single person on Earth, or, to put it another way, a million a minute and rising.

Shocking as these statistics are, they don’t explain why plastic bags have become so hated.

Given that there are far more voracious uses of fossil fuels than the production of high-density polyethylene used to make the bags, the argument is possibly more about aesthetics than wasting resources.

After they have been carried home, bags may be re-used once, but most end up at landfill sites.

A proportion will try to escape somewhere along the way, blustering around the streets or flapping annoyingly in trees.

This irritating habit has earned them a variety of nicknames around the world, such as ‘white pollution’ in China, and the ‘national flower’ in South Africa.

Plastic bags can also have a devastating effect on sea creatures.

There have been a number of cases recently where they have been ingested by turtles and whales, leading to internal obstruction and death.

The Planet Ark Environmental Foundation in Sydney, Australia, estimates that tens of thousands of whales, seals, turtles, and birds are killed every year from plastic bag litter, far out at sea.

Yet at the seaside, plastic bags make up only a tiny proportion of actual litter, with plastic bottles featuring higher in the list.

According to the Carrier Bag Consortium, a group of UK suppliers which was set up in 2002 to fight the anti-bag campaign, measures like the Irish bag tax have done nothing to reduce the consumption or solve the problem of disposal of plastic bags.

The Consortium likes to point out that plastic bags have among the highest re-use rates of any disposable product and, what is more, they are more energy-efficient to manufacture and transport than bulkier, heavier alternatives like paper or cardboard.

Unsurprisingly, the industry takes issue with being blamed for general environmental irresponsibility.

So if plastic bags aren't as bad as they are made out to be, are governments and green campaigners jumping on the wrong bandwagon?

Well, yes and no.

While the plastic carrier may have been made a scapegoat, it is also true that if you want people to think about sustainability, an everyday object that most of them already feel guilty about is a good place to start.

Governments have realised that by focusing on something so symbolic, they can get messages across to people about their behaviour and how the environment is and will continue to be affected by it, unless we all undertake some lifestyle changes.