If your grocery store doesn't recycle plastic bags, that's a different issue.

... I don't know where I'd go. In any event, it would, for sure, involve an extra trip. How COULD Amazon proliferate these in this day and age?????????????/

I use them to ship things to my kids and pack away ornaments and things like that.

I tear off or cover up the shipping labels and use packing tape to reseal. Any barcodes on the envelope get blocked out with a sharpie.

I also cut down used cardboard boxes to make a box the size I need.

ending up polluting our waterways and harming animal and sea life more than anything else.

... is re-cycled. Even things that don't end up floating in the water (although I'm not sure why envelopes would be so much less prone to that than bags.) Now the biggest retailer just thumbs its nose at those efforts and chooses a non-recyclable envelope. They should just switch to plain paper!

The issue is the lack of recycling facilities.

Okay, so there are other issues too, but the topic is about recycling.

I haven't seen any good resource for comparing total lifecycle impact of using trees for padded packaging vs using conventional, petroleum-based plastics, vs plant based plastics.

My instinct would be that compostable plant-based plastic would be best, if only municipalities would get their collective acts together and make municipal composting widely available and easy for the average citizen to do.

But that said, and it's a BIG "but" - what is the impact of growing the plants required for plant-based plastics, when 7.5 billion (actually might as well make it 8+ billion) people start consuming at first-world rates?

If we want to talk about impacting the ecosystem positively vs negatively, we need to talk about over-population and what to do about it. Anything else is fiddling around the edges. (But yeah we should do that fiddling when it's the only thing that can be done, as is the current case, because we may be able to slow the march toward catastrophe. Just know that is what we are doing.)

... have been banned in hundreds of municipalities because of the difficulty of re-cycling (have to take it to some hard to find special place, which may not exist if bags have been band.)