It was a decade ago when California became the first state in the nation to ban single-use plastic bags, ushering in a wave of anti-plastic legislation from coast to coast.
But in the years after California seemingly kicked its plastic grocery sack habit, material recovery facilities and environmental activists noticed a peculiar trend: Plastic bag waste by weight was increasing to unprecedented levels.
According to a report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, 157,385 tons of plastic bag waste was discarded in California the year the law was passed. By 2022, however, the tonnage of discarded plastic bags had skyrocketed to 231,072 — a 47% jump. Even accounting for an increase in population, the number rose from 4.08 tons per 1,000 people in 2014 to 5.89 tons per 1,000 people in 2022.
The problem, it turns out, was a section of the law that allowed grocery stores and large retailers to provide thicker, heavier-weight plastic bags to customers for the price of a dime.
They did this in the UK and it worked. The Cali law just has dumb ass loopholes in it.
That’s cause we didn’t actually ban them. Neo Liberals thought people would stop using them if they had to pay 10 cents.
Turns out, nobody cared. We need an actual ban.
Or one just buys them in bulk and brings their own plastic bags to the store. Cheaper than $.10, still legal.
Plastic grocery bags take up so little space and are so versatile for so many things that would otherwise take thicker more expensive trashbag-like material, or paper or cloth that can’t handle wet.
Replacing them at the store didn’t replace them at the litterbox, at the quick trip to the friend’s house to bring some snacks, at the carpet stain cleanup, at the garage project cleanup, at side of the road car repair, for emergency gloves in a pinch, at stopping liquid leaks in your car’s trunk because some container broke, at the small bathroom trash can at home, and so many other places where those bags can and do get reused a bunch of times. Paper and cloth bags both leak. Cloth bags waste drinking water to clean. Regular trash bags not only cost more, but like this article mentions, are also thicker plastic resulting in more plastic ending up in a landfill.
Not trying to sound pro-plastic grocery bag, just pointing out that they are infinitely useful for so many small tasks, and the replacements can’t hold up to the task, or are worse in several ways. It’s difficult to remove something from peoples’ processes when there aren’t any reasonable substitutes.
Paper probably has the best bet of going back to prevalence since it can be a carbon sink cycle, but it will take time.
What? Cloth bags are vastly superior. You wash them every once and a while with all the rest of your clothes. I just bring them back down to my car so I have them wherever I go. That is by far the best option.
Try putting anything with any liquid on it in a cloth bag and report back bud
I’m sorry you got downvoted by morons.
It’s okay it happens frequently
What the fuck liquids are you buying in a store and putting in a bag? There are already several other containers made to hold liquids. Bags are not one of them.
Tell that to Canadians and their weird ass milk solutions.
It could still be a financial penalty, but it should be 10 dollars instead of 10 cents.
That would probably do it
Not OP, but that’s what we did in the UK too… I’m honestly confused reading the post and the comments calling California out on this. I must be misunderstanding something because we did the same thing and it really, really worked. The UK led the charge on the concept of ‘nudges’ like this and it’s been successful and widely praised. We still have thick plastic bags that you buy for 10p, but most people really do keep some on hand for most situations so plastic dumping has been significantly reduced.
The ‘nudges’ thing is contested. It’s basically from one book and the studies that used it mostly showed temporary single digit differences. Then there’s a lot of celebration that “the rate of change is picking up!” before long term effects fail to emerge. It falls smack dab in the center of the replication crisis.
A lot more direct action is required to make sizeable changes, like outreach campaigns and actually trying to change people’s minds/behavior.
Somewhere a Social Anthropologist is lining up their PhD paper.
I think the gig economy and the pandemic both had a hand in this as well. The pandemic set things up for curbside pickup and increased the number of people using things like Instacart, and a lot of people who switched to that have stayed on them. But both curbside pickup and Instacart-style services need a convenient way for the collector of goods to get that stuff to the purchaser, so they’re going to buy bags for their deliveree. And the deliveree is going to end up with stacks and stacks of reusable bags that they’re never going to reuse (because they order pickup or delivery). They try to donate them but a lot of places don’t take them, so they end up in the trash.
Would it not work to do like we do for refundable cans? QR code or barcode on the bag to verify and store drop off for a refund of this 10/15¢. People would go out of their way to collect and drop these off at facilities that could accept and recycle these.
now plastic bags are no longer free - but honestly $0.15/bag is basically free so most folks still toss them out.
Plastic bags need to be banned totally.
It seems that a better alternative to banning plastic, which was never going to succeed, would be to mandate plant based plastics. Of course, then we get farmers growing plastic rather than food (remember ethanol?)….
Ethanol? You mean corn? Grain alcohol has been a thing for centuries.
In my neck of the woods, when it was being touted as a gasoline replacement, many farmers abandoned soy and wheat to grow corn. Many corn farmers refused to sell their crops as animal feed or human food because they could get better prices from ethanol producers. It created a food/feed problem for a few years.
Or taxing the shit out of plastic production…
Tax the things you don’t want out of existence. Subsidize the things you want until they stand up on their own.
We’ve been subsidizing oil and gas/petrochem plastic manufacturing for far too long.
Tax the production, and give the plastic companies rebates for plastic they permanently remove from the environment.
I have a better idea, if you don’t want to use plastic bags don’t use plastic bags, leave other people alone to decide what they want to use.
Banning plastic bags totally would’ve worked if not for the part of the law that allowed them to be legal if they were thicker.
A better move would have been focusing on larger uses of plastic, or helping developing countries get a functioning waste system. Single use plastic bags are super public, but practically irrelevant in terms of oil use or plastic waste.
I assumed we already had. Years ago, the thin bags became too crappy to re-use for anything, but whenever i did, a year later they’d be all yellowed and disintegrating
“banned…”
They never banned them. They just made people have to pay for them.
Germany did this years ago. Seems to work. You can still get plastic bags, but you have to pay for them.
That’s what the article is saying.
The intent was to drop plastic usage. It did, but plastic usage multiplied because the plastic bags people are paying for contain more plastic than before.
Another German law states that if you make a product, like a plastic bag, you must pay for its disposal after use. That way, if a product changes, the manufacturer bears the cost. Does drive prices up, though.
Damn, some others countries successfully banned single-use plastic bags years ago, replacing them by re-usable thicker bags that you can buy, people are now accustomed to bring bags to go shopping.
Seems like californians have too much money or are very generous.
We have these cheap fabric bags that groceries stores give out here in Canada. They cost something like 25 cents each and could theoretically be used disposably but most people don’t seem to. I have a stupid amount of them stuffed into my car’s trunk that I bring into stores.
Does California only sell those big plastic re-useable bags? I don’t even really see those here in Canada much anymore
Or the bags are too cheap.
Ireland has a plastic bag levy of 22c per bag. Most supermarkets don’t even bother selling single use bags any more. If you want to buy a bag, then your choice is a thicker reusable bag or a “bag for life” that most supermarkets will charge you 70c or more for.
I suppose some people might throw them away but more likely they hang onto them because they cost so much to begin with.
In some supermarkets like LIDL and Aldi it’s also quite common for someone to grab an empty cardboard box that (the stores usually toss them in a big mesh bin) and use that to carry stuff away. These can be put into recycling.
There is also a drive to ban single use plastics like cutlery, straws, cups etc. Ireland also just imposed a refundable tax on plastic bottles and cans - supermarkets have machines that ingest returned containers and print out a credit slip.
ok so this is a mindset problem : people are too accustomed to disposable, and lost the habit to re-use (thank to Consumer society)?
This problem can be solved with education, with new habits taught to young generations : awareness courses about waste management, teaching about sorting, waste reduction, composting and food waste.
In my area they do it since 6 years in schools, now children are educating their parents !
That is such an idiotic loophole there is no way in hell it wasn’t bought by lobbyists
Totally was. In NJ, those poor saps were sold by the grocer lobbyists that the paper and plastic bag ban was good for reducing the amount of plastic bags. NJ is now seeing that there was no reduction in waste, but rather than cost being passed into the consumer. I lol’d so hard because “I told you so”
News 12 reported it on TV, so no, I have no link, but you can go find one.
Same shit, different set of idiots.
The whole scheme is a farce designed to take what was once complimentary and turn it into a highly profitable side business. It’s the same the world over.
I refuse to buy into the scam u can now find me balancing my groceries intop of eavhother as i try navugate from my car to my kitchen. Yes i know i could use a reusable bag but i always forget.
What made the difference for me was buying a really nice reusable bag. There’s a brand called Flip and Tumble. They’ll hold an absurd amount of stuff (something like 35lbs, if I remember correctly) and fold down into something smaller than a tennis ball. I keep two in the bottom of my purse and never need a bag. They are expensive (about $18 US), but I’ve had mine for almost 15 years.
You & me both. Yes I have a few in the car. No I’m not going back to get it. I’ll probably make it without dropping something.
Its just a small, unnecessary moment of tension in my day. And its mine.
You described most CA laws - don’t get me started on CARB and how is just pushing us toward bigger, less efficient cars while killing innovation by smaller engineering shops
I’ma have to get you started. Explain yourself.
I’ma second. This is officiallly unofficial permission to begin your dissertation on unforeseen consequences. I’m here for this.
They did this in Chicago too and everyone immediately saw that it wasn’t about reducing plastic, but about getting more money to the city. If they actually cared about plastic, they would actually ban it. And you know what, It’s not hard at all. Think about what people were using in the 70s before plastic on everything was common. Paper grocery bags, wax paper at the deli counter, cardboard cartons for small fruit like blueberries, lettuce and potatoes laying bare on shelves instead of wrapped up in plastic bundles, beverages in cans and glass bottles. If they could do it, we can do it too.
Fair points. But look also at downstream uses for plastics that they’re banning. Many people reuse them as storage, litter box liners, trash bin liners, art materials…. All uses that would still need to be filled. Of course, banning them creates a market for replacement plastic products or boosts sales of existing products, so more money for capitalists, I guess.
As for open food in markets, I for one, having so far lived through a pandemic, can’t wait for a return to the days when sniffling, sneezing germ factories spewed mucus and worse all over the produce day in and day out.
Maybe, but I had already stopped doing this years before because the thin bags became too crappy to re-use for anything. I can’t be the only one
this isnt just california. they rolled out these thicker bags everywhere so they are no longer ‘single use’ except to the people that use them.
In CO this doesn’t seem to be much of a thing. Almost everyone is using reusable fabric bags or no bags at all. I can’t recall seeing thicker bags for sale at any of the retailers I frequent. Many don’t have bags at checkouts at all anymore even though you can buy the thin ones for a dime.
ive seen them in at least 3 different states on the east coast
Those thicker bags, tear easily and usually don’t survive longer than the trip home. It’s a stupid loophole. They also can’t be washed. So if you do reuse them, it’s a great way to buildup bacteria and molds.
In reality they are thicker single used bags.
The bags sold in NJ aren’t plastic. It is this weird cloth product.
I don’t know if it is synthetic.
If it’s the really common kind of reusable bag that costs about $1 and resembles this…
…then yes, it’s synthetic.
Interesting, here in NY grocery stores can’t have any plastic bags. The only bags they have are paper. Restaurants can have plastic bags though.
Here in MO basically everyone has super thin bags that suck ass.
They literally aren’t even worth using to pickup dog shit here in Florida. Because you’ll get it on your hands.
Yep. I’m instacart so I shop basically everywhere. The only places between here and Kansas that I see with good bags are Target and sprouts.
The idea of reusable bags was great, but they operated the same as the old plastic bags. They’re thicker, more durable, but most people don’t care enough to bring back their old bags, and will just buy new ones because it’s convenient. Speaking from personal experience.
Also, different places have different protocols, sometimes they make you bag your own groceries if you bring your own bags. Again, some people won’t bother.
Yeah. Why are they even offering these? Use paper for instacart shoppers only. Everyone else needs to bring their own. Why is it so hard to put this into play?
Because stores lose out on the impulse shopper market. Who didn’t plan to go shopping and didn’t bring bags.
