California’s Latest Effort To Ban Plastic Bags Also Doomed To Fail

  Issues & Insights (issuesinsights.com)

"The author of Assembly Bill 2236 probably said a little too much, admitting that her legislation was a battle in the California war on oil."

Ten years after Sacramento outlawed single-use plastic bags (with the help of a majority of voters two years later in a referendum), legislators have approved a ban on the multi-use bags that took their place, with each chamber passing a bill that, in identical language, prohibits “a reusable grocery bag sold by a store to a customer at the point of sale” from being “made from plastic film material.”

Stores would be allowed to provide customers who forget to bring their reusable bags – and those who refuse on principle to use them – with paper sacks. But they will have to be, beginning on Jan. 1, 2028, made “from a minimum of 50% postconsumer recycled materials.” The paper bags will have to cost at least 10 cents each.

Neither bill is law yet. But the ban will be in effect after the formalities of the legislative process are completed.

Sen. Catherine Blakespear, the Encinitas Democrat who authored Senate Bill 1053, said the state’s “original ban on plastic bags hasn’t worked out as planned, and sadly, the state’s plastic bag waste has increased dramatically since it went into effect.”

Maybe the volume “increased dramatically” because the thin single-use bags were replaced by heavier multi-use bags, which are at least four times thicker.

“The amount of plastic bag waste discarded per person (by weight) actually increased in the years following the law’s implementation to the highest level on record – proving the ban ineffective at reducing the total amount of plastic waste,” says a report compiled by multiple organizations, one of them the Naderite U.S. Public Interest Group.

Nevertheless, Blakespear said “we need to do better,” because “shockingly, some 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year from coastal regions alone. California must do its part to eliminate this scourge that is contaminating our environment.”