Wrapped in Plastic,Choked by Plastic

Now it’s almost 4 months I am in US. I am living in a duplex in a very beautiful community here in Evansville. There is a small lake and the place is very peaceful. The community is also well maintained. Every Thursday they trim the grass and the remove the garbage from the community dustbin.
But I wonder why there is no recycling option. We have to throw all the bottles and cans and pet bottles along with vegetable remains and papers in one bin!!!
It is like this in India. But, hi there! I am in the US now!!It is supposed to be one of the First World Countries.
In Switzerland, I lived in a small town called Vevey and a smaller place called Bonivard. In both the places there was clear division of waste disposal. And I have become used to that. When we lived in Denmark, we had the option of returning the pet bottles and cans to the stores recycling point where they returned some deposit money they charge with the price. I can see recycle advices on bottles. But there is no easily accessible recycle point nearby.
Another thing struck me. There are quite a lot of pets in our community. But I find people callously careless about disposing their pet's shits!! Yeah, there are those little black plastics which I have seen in every other country. There is also written advice beside those to use them to keep the community clean. But I find dog shit everywhere in the grass. And I have noticed while taking their dogs out in the morning or in the evening, very few of them take those plastics with them. In all other European cities and mainly in Vevey, I have found people so much more responsible about keeping the place clean. I actually found only 1 lady (in Vevey 2009), among the many people who used to come with their pets, who brought three dogs and didn’t carry one of those plastics. And I was very angry with her for making the beautiful field dirty.

There's another thing and perhaps the most important of these that struck me as an example of the US tendency to be callously continuing environment pollution while lecturing big on these topics in the World scenario.
Why do these supermarkets always give hundreds and thousands of plastic bags to each customer?
I have seen this only in UK. In Frankfurt, in Vevey and in most other places we had to buy paper bags that were very cheap and that could be used again and again. Only clothes and shoes came with thick plastic bags.
These hundreds and thousands of plastic bags from all these superstores are choking our Mother Nature.
Do you know that plastic bags are made from petroleum or natural gas? Think of the environmental impact of harvesting more and more fossil fuel. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags. It's the same as dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.
Unlike a glass beer bottle or an aluminum can, it's unusual that a plastic bag is made back into another plastic bag, because it's typically more expensive than just making a new plastic bag.

Only 2 percent of plastic bags are recycled in US and the rest of them are going to stay in the environment for eternity as we all know that plastic bags are not biodegradable. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
 In the Northern Pacific Gyre, a great vortex of ocean currents, there's now a swirling mass of plastic trash about 1,000 miles off the coast of California, which spans an area that's twice the size of Texas, including fragments of plastic bags. There's six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre. "It's an endless stream of incessant plastic particles everywhere you look," says Dr. Marcus Eriksen, director of education and research for the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which studies plastics in the marine environment. "Fifty or 60 years ago, there was no plastic out there.

If countries like South Africa, Bangladesh, Thailand and Taiwan can ban plastic bags, why can’t USA?
Do you think the large companies making and using these plastic bags are unaware of the impact?
Or, do they just not care?
What do you think US citizen should do to put an end to this?
Should they stop accepting these plastics?
I would love to hear from you.