How did you get this week’s groceries home?

Chances are, you carried your food home in one-time-use, thin plastic bags.

Use of these ubiquitous bags have, in the last few decades, become a habit for most of us. We need to change that habit.

New Yorkers use 23 billion plastic bags annually, according to the governor’s office. The disposable bags litter our landscape and do great harm to creatures in our lakes and oceans.

Many animals ingest the discarded bags, creating problems afterward with digestion and breathing. At least 267 species of marine wildlife have suffered from being entangled in or eating debris, most of which is plastic, according to the Worldwatch Institute; tens of thousands of seals, birds, whales, and turtles die every year from contact with ocean-borne plastic bags. Once in the water, the bags break down into tiny, toxic pellets, ingested by aquatic creatures. About 90 percent of the birds examined in a North Sea study conducted by the European Commission had plastic in their stomachs.

Even if the bags weren’t so frequently strewn about as litter, even if they all made it to a landfill, there is still a huge problem. Plastic isn’t biodegradable. A bag that makes it to a landfill take hundreds of years to decompose, releasing toxins into the soil as it does so.

So, while you may eat the food you bought this week, the bags you carried that food home in will be haunting the Earth for centuries.

Beyond that, plastic bags are made from petroleum, and producing them requires a lot of fossil-fuel-derived energy. So, to make these bags, oil is drilled for and imported, and the carbon-dioxide released in the process adds to the greenhouse effect that has caused climate change with its subtle and catastrophic effects.

Our state is currently in the midst of deciding what to do about plastic bags. New York City passed a local law to charge a fee for the use of plastic bags since its sanitation department estimates it collects 1,700 tons of plastic bags each week, which cost $12.5 million annually to dispose of. The state legislature then passed a bill to block the city’s law.

When Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the bill into law, he said he would create a statewide task force to look at the best way to manage the use of plastic bags. The task force is being led by the chairs of the Legislative Environmental Conservation Committees and includes representation from the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation, the New York State Association of Counties, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Food Industry Alliance. The association of counties is currently gathering feedback from counties across the state, and we urge local county leaders to participate.

Most people, even well-meaning people, won’t change their habits without legislation. Countries in Europe long ago proposed successful bans or levies. In 2002, for example, Ireland levied a plastic-bag tax that has led to a 95-percent reduction in plastic-bag litter there.

Last year, California voters passed a proposition that made it the first state in the country to ban single-use plastic bags. At the same time, there is a counter movement by states with Republican-controlled legislatures. Bag-producing companies have fought local plastic-bag regulations. And these state bans against regulations — in Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, and Wisconsin — have served to tamp down all municipal efforts. Statewide bans on plastic-bag regulation are hurting all Americans; we share the planet.

The issue is local, though, because, as we can see in New York City, the costs of disposal are borne by the municipality. We’re fine with a statewide approach as long as one is enacted. A fee, as New York City had proposed, may work better than an absolute ban on plastic bags.

A bag ban in Chicago, for example, simply led some stores to increase the heft of their plastic bags so they met the threshold of a reusable bag. Chicago has since scrapped its ban for a seven-cent fee on all carry-out bags.

Washington, D.C., starting in 2010, began charging five cents for paper or plastic carry-out bags, which led to a 60-percent drop both in litter and in overall single-use bags. And a survey showed 80 percent of D.C. residents were positive or neutral about the bag fee.

So, once people change their habits, it’s not onerous. Many of us are old enough to remember when grocery bags were paper — which is biodegradable and does not put toxins in the earth — or when every garbage can or trash can wasn’t lined with plastic. Sometimes, returning to old ways is a sign of progress.

We urge our state to come up with a way to control the use of plastic bags — it will help with curbing climate change, will protect the creatures we share the planet with, will keep the Earth from centuries of toxins, and will save taxpayers money on disposal costs.

Meanwhile, while we wait for the task force to come up with a plan, we should carry reusable cloth bags to the store when we go to shop. We’ll close with a slogan from the past that is apt today: Think globally, act locally.