Much of the litter in my apartment complex is from exactly this - animals getting into the dumpster, or a stiff gust of wind blowing some loose item out.
However, we’ve had a few people who didn’t hide their use of the grounds as a trash dump. I also had one neighbor for a while (and granted, he was a college student) who would put his trash out on the patio and then forget about it - and have to pick it all up when a raccoon or opossum got into it overnight.
So, your theory is that squirrels shredding plastic bags are responsible for microplastics in the oceans?
Maybe not …
As for what “synthetic textiles” means, it’s this:
The washing of synthetic textiles has been identified as an important source of microplastic fibers (MPF) released to the environment. In addition, abrasion of textiles was shown to induce further fragmentation of fibers and subsequent formation of much smaller and shorter fibrils.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04826
And IIRC it was using the assumption that a thin-film disposable plastic bag was reused once and then efficiently incinerated, which is how its overall environmental impact worked out to be thousands of times smaller than that of a cloth tote bag.
If you factor in the reality of all the non-incinerated, especially the incorrectly discarded, plastic bags, it’s not such a great environmental deal compared to reusable cloth bags.
(However, there’s still a very strong argument for getting cloth bags secondhand, making them from existing fabric such as worn-out garments, and/or mending them to make them last as long as possible. Tote bags made out of old blue jeans that some granny sells at the local church craft fair, for instance, are pretty much zero in terms of additional environmental impact. Or even less than zero, considering that they’re keeping some discarded garment fabric out of landfills and out of the international clothing-donation waste stream.)
There’s also a strong environmental argument for grabbing some bags that already exist before you go to the store. Reusable cloth bags, the plastic bags they gave you last time, paper page, whatever. The environmental impact of reusing any existing bag is about zero.
(I rather like the cheap reusable woven fiber bags that don’t hold water, fwiw. They are very strong and can carry 2 gallons of milk. They are very light and fold up to take little storage. And you can use them lots of time before they show wear.)
One side effect is feeling like a shoplifter.
I often find myself without a bag, but goods that are few enough in number to carry in my hands and pockets.
Then wondering whether it’s more suspicious to smile at the security guard as I leave, or avoid eye contact 
I’ve been known to use my grocery bag as a shopping basket, while hoping that doesn’t look too suspicious.
As for security, I’d think you’d seem less suspicious by smiling or offering some friendly greeting than by doing the “no eye contact” thing that could seem kind of shifty. 
I do that all the time, despite some stores having signs telling you not to.
I also do it in the liquor store, where I use these neat sectioned bags I get from wineries that hold six bottles. Liquor stores around here seem to hire security guards during the holiday season, for whatever reason. I was amused when I was loading a bunch of wine bottles into one of those bags and noticed a security guard eyeing me from a distance, obviously trying to figure out if this was “customer putting merchandise into a reusable bag”, or something more like “thief slipping merchandise into a backpack”. 
Of course, the use of such services has exploded in the last two years due to the pandemic, so part of this problem is that we have a single-use bag ban coming in just as we’ve all gotten used to delivery and curbside pick-up, and no one stopped to think about the synergy between these two major changes.
'Zactly.
The packaging from farm to consumer is substantially all non-reusable because there’s no practical way to back-track that stuff from consumer to the upstream suppliers for their reuse.
By moving the supplier-consumer handoff away from the stores’ cashier station out to the consumer’s front door, the window for reusability just shrank from consumer-to-store-to-consumer down to consumer front door to consumer kitchen to consumer front door. While still practically requiring additional packaging for the store cashier to consumer front door leg of the journey.
Oops.
Wellll, depends. When I was getting front-porch delivery from my local farm cooperative during lockdowns and afterwards, their packaging was all either paper or/and reusable plastic containers that we put out on the porch next week for the deliveryperson to pick up during their next delivery. They just kept reusing the same plastic tote bags and freezer pouches and clamshells etc. for different customers, week after week.
No hassle, very sustainable, and also a convenient mechanism for no-contact tipping of deliverypersons.
True. And involved a highly self-selected group of people willing to deal with all that and the implied sharing going on. I’ve done CSA myself although it’s been a long time.
Plenty of modern consumers would go absolutely apeshit if they knew their produce and even packaged foods were put into plastic crates at the store which had previously held somebody else’s purchases and had not been comprehensively sterilized before being used to hold their own purchases.
Re-used = “has cooties” in the minds of LOTS of people. At least unless they’re the only person doing the re-using of those items.
I got front porch delivery of some items during lockdown. One company required me to provide my own cooler. That must not have worked, because their stuff now comes packaged in a box with a cold pack, and they text me when they arrive so i know to bring it in right away.
Other companies prices a cooler or insulated bag, and asked me to leave the old one out for pickup. That seems to have been sustainable. It never occurred to me that i should be upset that someone else’s food sat in the same Styrofoam box they put my food into. I take stuff out of “shared” bins at the grocery store, too.
here where I live in the desert grocery store plastic bag (actually anything plastic dosent last long)doesn’t even last a week outside before it dissolves or crumbles …but it never occurred to me it was still problematic after doing so
But I received a reminder on why paper sucks as a bag when the instacart shopper put 4 jars of spaghetti sauce with 2 big jars of cheese in one bag and the handles on the bag broke luckily it was from aldi’s and the jars were mostly plastic or id of been pissed and getting a refund ,
I walk out with my receipt held out conspicuously, then toss it in the trash when I get outside.
I remember that commercial, but could not recall quite how old it was. So I went and looked it up:
What does Zip-loc broth even taste like? 
To revisit this, I was wondering what people now think about the ban on plastic bags. On the whole, I find it a nuisance.
I don’t mind helping the environment, if this is the real effect. I don’t mind paper straws. I don’t consider paying a nickel per bag to be significant. I am good at putting tote bags in my car, much less good at bringing them from the car into the store. I have stopped buying bags, since O have enough, which might means taking the cart to the car Costco style.
But if the new bags are less environmentally friendly than plastic, which I always reuse, then this is just a big wankathon. It makes uninformed people feel better while just causing (admittedly mild) inconvenience. I’d rather they limited these things to things that definitively help the environment. I hope I am wrong and this change does.
Depending on the specifics, the bag bans do definitively help the environment. You might reuse plastic bags, but lots of people don’t. And loads of people won’t pay a nickel for a plastic or paper bag if all they bought was a tube of toothpaste although they won’t say “no bag” if it’s free.
And then they fling it out of their car window as the leave the store parking lot. I have seen this.