A few years back this column designated a small rocky escarpment on Route 25 in Bridgeport, near the Trumbull border (just across from Beardsley Park), as the "Hanging Great Gardens of Plastic," or some such moniker.

The reason for the christening was because the place was where every plastic shopping bag in a 20-mile area seemed to go to die a slow, non-biodegradable death in the limbs of the scraggily trees along the bottom of the cliff.

Actually the shopping bags that flapped aimlessly in the wind like tattered Buddhist prayer flags on some Himalayan mountain trail came from the parking lots of a Shaw's supermarket and Home Depot store atop the cliff.

The sight of the bags was a jarring "Welcome to Bridgeport" sight for people like Connecticut Post weekend editor Jim Shay, who first mentioned the plastic garden, as they traveled to and from work every day.

A couple of weeks after that column ran, a crew of state Department of Transportation workers magically appeared. Using cherry picker platforms they removed every last plastic bag from every last limb.

We heard unconfirmed reports that some regular highway travelers, having come to appreciate the hanging garden as one of Bridgeport's few genuine tourist attractions, were disappointed when it was no longer there.

The area has remained fairly bag-free since then, thanks mostly to the closing of Shaw's. But the issue of plastic bags and what happens to them after their brief, useful life is over has not

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gone away. It is, in fact, gaining momentum.

Only last week the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 10-1 to ban non-biodegradable plastic bags. A study by the American Forest Association estimates some seven billion plastic bags were used in the United States in 2005, according to an article in The New York Times. The number of plastic bags used worldwide ranges to one trillion.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency estimates that only 5.2 percent of those bags are recycled. The rest go into landfills and onto trees and telephone poles.

For the most part, supermarkets have embraced the plastic bag wholeheartedly since they started turning up at the checkout aisles in the late 1970s. That famous question "paper or plastic?" has all but faded from the checkout clerks' vocabulary. Now, unless you threaten the manager with bodily harm, you'll get plastic and like it. The soda bottles get double plastic.

Let us not forget another factor in the rise of the plastic bag. To use that over-quoted, but endlessly right Walt Kelly line, we have seen the enemy and they are us. Oh, yes, how we love those flimsy-but-rip-proof plastic bags with their built-in handles that make carrying them so easy. (I pride myself on being able to move an entire shopping trip's worth of groceries from the car to the kitchen counter in one arm-aching trip. The trick is to turn the doorknob without dropping a kumquat. Try that with paper.)

And when the groceries are all put away, plastic bags can be smushed into neat balls that take up hardly any space in the garbage can or the sleeve where a few are kept to transport the occasional lunch.

We are secretly relieved the clerks no longer present us with that guilt-yielding paper/plastic dilemma. (Although it would be nice to have a couple of paper sacks to put the newspapers in since those sticklers at recycling don't let you put them in plastic.)

Supermarkets feel the guilt, too, but their remedies are half-hearted at best, offering to take back shoppers' used plastic bags for recycling or to reuse them. But the idea of walking to the market carrying a bag of bags does not sit well with people. The best the supermarkets can do is offer to recycle our old bags. The reusable cloth bags they sell for $1 are nice but, a backpack full of them would be needed to carry the average American's weekly food shopping.

At this very moment Connecticut legislators are debating an addition to the bottle bill that would have water and juice bottles go into the bins. That bill is likely to go into the garbage with the bottles this session. Doing something about the far more pressing problem of the massive waste of plastic bags is not even a glimmer in the lawmakers' eyes.

Plastic bags, which are made from the Earth's finite supply of petroleum, cost about a penny apiece to manufacture. Paper bags, on the other hand, cost a nickel to produce using renewable trees. It is that four-cent gap that is the problem. So if you are looking for supermarket clerks to start asking "paper or paper?" anytime soon, relax. It's going to be quite a while before the plastic decorations in the trees come down for good.

Readers can reach Charles Walsh by e-mail at cwalsh@ctpost.com, or

by standard mail c/o the Connecticut Post, 410 State St.,

Bridgeport CT 06604.