From USA Today:

Now, the city of San Francisco has come up with an answer. The city's Board of Supervisors voted last week to outlaw plastic checkout bags at large supermarkets and chain pharmacies. The stores are encouraged to use bags made of recyclable paper, which can biodegrade in about a month, or compostable bags made of corn or potato starch, which have not yet been widely studied. It is a unique response well suited to a city that prizes its special nature — one that already has curbside pickup for recycling foodstuffs in compostable bags. But as other cities weigh San Francisco's choice, they might want to consider some of the consequences.

Paper bags, meanwhile, generate 70% more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This is because four times as much energy is required to produce paper bags and 85 times as much energy is needed to recycle them. Paper takes up nine times as much space in landfills and doesn't break down there at a substantially faster rate than plastic does.

On a related note, here's the abstract of a new paper in the Journal of Public Economics:

Interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the New Deal. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the New Deal crowded-out church charitable spending in the 1930s. We do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large Christian denominations, matched to data on local New Deal spending. We instrument for New Deal spending using measures of the political strength of a state's congressional delegation, and confirm our findings using a different instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief spending. With both instruments we find that higher government spending leads to lower church charitable activity. Crowd-out was small as a share of total New Deal spending (3%), but large as a share of church spending: our estimates suggest that benevolent church spending fell by 30% in response to the New Deal, and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939.