Plastic shopping bags are a plague on our planet. Everywhere we turn, we’re offered yet another disposable plastic bag, and for the most part, they end up going home with us, where we then need to deal with them. And the numbers are staggering: An estimated 102 billion plastic bags were used in 2009 in the U.S. alone (and 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags used worldwide each year).

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Bringing your own reusable bag with you when you go shopping can help bypass this menace (or simply telling the cashier “I don’t need a bag. I can carry this.”), and luckily for us, there are quite a few options for individuals to get reusable shopping bags.

But what would be even better would be for businesses and organizations to ditch the disposables and use only reusable bags for their branding and ‘gimme’ (SWAG) items. One source for these that recently came to my attention is ReuseThisBag.com.