Drifting around the high street this Christmas, you may notice a luminous sticker in shop windows with the words “Plastic Ain’t My Bag” written on it in chunky letters. Failing that, you are sure to spot someone carrying a cream fabric shopping bag – not unlike the coveted Anya Hindmarch one – with the same logo on it. Either way, you have hit on a campaign launched by social-change movement We Are What We Do (WAWWD) to make this the first plastic-free Christmas.

A tad ambitious, yes, but given the success of its best-selling book Change the World for a Fiver, followed by its collaboration with the British handbag designer, which produced a simple sturdy shopper so popular that Sainsbury’s sold all 20,000 within an hour of opening, it is not beyond WAWWD. Working with retailers and shoppers, it aims to make carrying a plastic bag as unfashionable as wearing fur.

Yet, even in these environmentally anxious times, we are stunningly bad at shunning plastic bags. Ten billion are handed out to British shoppers every year – that’s 290 per person – each one being used for around 12 minutes, but hanging around the planet for the next 500 years.

What’s the attraction? Well, for starters, they are free. Something for nothing is always popular. Plus, we are often given them without asking, which means that you have to be an active resister to avoid them. Then there’s the fact we are likely to forget to bring our own, however many plastic-bag dispensers we hang up in our kitchen.

The one excuse that has no credibility any longer is that there aren’t any other options. There are hundreds. In the wake of I’m Not a Plastic Bag fever, scores of wannabes have followed, made from every imaginable material – from jute, hemp and bamboo to corn starch, string, recycled paper and even banana leaves. Some carry worthy slogans, others are simply designed to look pretty, but few companies miss the opportunity to slap their logos on them.

The latest to cause a buzz is designed by none other than George W’s niece, Lauren Bush. Although her family is not generally associated with environmentalism, this Bush progeny has created an alternative to a plastic bag that also ticks the charity box. Profits from sales of the World Food Programme Feed bag will go towards providing a meal a day for two children in the developing world for a year. The only catch is you’ll have to visit Harrods and spend £35 to get your hands on one. Before that, the more affordable £2.99 Superdrug tote bag was fêted after Kate Moss was snapped with one slung over her shoulder.

In fact, when you start totting up the number of eco-friendly shopping bags available, not only on the high street but also in designer shops (a silk foldaway bag from Hermès – a snip at £500, anyone?), you realise that every company worth its PR department is jumping on the eco-bag bandwagon. It’s a fabulous promotional tool: you bring out a bag that shows everyone how responsible you are, acquiring greenie points and free publicity.

But not all eco bags are created equal. According to Rebecca Hosking, the BBC wildlife camerawoman behind the banning of plastic bags in the Devon town of Modbury, some are not even deserving of the title “eco”. Broadly speaking, she supports the use of any bag that lasts – saving on energy and materials – but she says we should also consider how the material has been grown, harvested and manufactured. “Otherwise, the lovely new eco bag that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling when you use it could have caused more harm in its production than you think,” she writes on www.plasticbagfree.com.

Her personal favourite is a wicker basket: no logos, no bleaches or inks, simply an example of good old rustic chic. Failing that, she recommends seeking out a Fairtrade-certified bag, or at least one that is “produced to fair-trade principles”, made from organically grown, unbleached material.

The other thing to watch is price. “It is incredibly hard to find environmental goods that are cheap,” she says. “If the price sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.” This doesn’t bode well for WAWWD’s bags, both retailing for £5. The designer version came under fire, earlier this year, when it emerged that it had been manufactured in China without a seal of approval from either an organic or a fair-trade body.

The new bag is also made in China, a decision that Eugenie Harvey, WAWWD’s co-founder, defends. “The point of the bag is that it is mass-produced, available at a low price for as many people as possible, unlike the exclusive Hindmarch one,” she tells me. She knows it’s not perfect. “In an ideal world, it would be manufactured in the UK, but we are pleased that it has been made from organic cotton, shipped to the UK – not flown – and that the factories over there have been audited to oversee working conditions,” she says.

That not all fabric bags are pea-green themselves should be balanced against their value as a means of weaning us off plastic, a non-renewable, polluting material, made from oil. It takes 430,000 gallons of oil to produce 100 million plastic bags, according to Worldwatch Institute. The other important question is whether the proliferation of plastic bag alternatives has reduced our plastic bag use – or do we buy them in a fit of green guilt, only to sling them into the corners of our homes alongside other victims of bag fads?

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