The thoughts that bounce around in one's head late at night are funny and unpredictable, but this bag thing came back to me, and here's what I was thinking: single-use plastic bags nearly always blow out on the bottom, when something sharp in the bag starts a tear. It's never the handles that fail, and any tear that starts higher up usually still holds the item, not a catastrophic failure.
So, if "they" really wanted to save plastic, rather than making the bags so thin that everyone just uses twice as many, they'd do well to make the bags a gradient thickness. Go ahead and make the top half and handles of the bag as thin as 0.5 mils, but keep the bottoms at 1 mil. You'd think this'd be easy enough by making them of sheet stock that's thicker on one edge than the other, or thinned down in the middle (they seem to fold and seal to make these). With thicker bottoms, most might only use 1 or put twice as much into each, and you'd be saving net plastic usage with the thinner tops, where strength isn't needed as much.
. Wide open you could read a book so I keep it low as it goes.
