California Banned Single-Use Plastic Bags. Now It's Tossing More Plastic.
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California Banned Single-Use Plastic Bags. Now It's Tossing More Plastic.
An anonymous reader shares a report: When California state legislators passed a 2014 law banning single-use plastic bags, the hope was that it would notably reduce the amount of discarded plastic. But fast-forward nearly a decade: Californians are tossing more pounds of plastic bags than before the legislation was passed. That's according to a recent report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, which took population changes into account and found the tonnage of discarded bags rose from 4.08 per 1,000 people in 2014 to 5.89 per 1,000 people in 2022. How could this happen?
As Susanne Rust reported this week, plastic bag manufacturers replaced one kind of plastic bag for another. You've probably noticed them at grocery stores or had them loaded into your car during a drive-up order. These newer bags are thicker and meet technical specifications to be called "reusable." As Jenn Engstrom, CALPIRG'S state director, explained to Susanne, the switch created a loophole because the newer bags -- which typically cost 10 cents -- "are clearly not being reused and don't look like reusable bags and ... just circumvent the law's intent." The pandemic was also a contributing factor. COVID restrictions led many to get groceries, restaurant dishes and other products delivered to our doors, often in thick plastic bags.
There's an effort to close the loophole, though. New legislation is being proposed that would also ban the thicker plastic bags from grocery and large retail stores. Clearly, not enough consumers have changed their plastic bag habits at the checkout stand. But the onus isn't on individuals. Plastic manufacturers create these products. Businesses buy the bags so customers have somewhere to put the goods they buy from businesses. [...] Under the new law, at least 30% of plastic items sold, distributed or imported into California must be recyclable by Jan. 1, 2028. It also stipulates that single-use plastic waste be reduced 25% by 2032. But as Susanne pointed out, plastics companies will have notable oversight and authority over the program "via a Producer Responsibility Organization, which will be made up of industry representatives."
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To me it's a pity, because the 10 cent bags are good if you use and re-use them, and they are good enough to re-use. Much less likely to burst open and drop all your stuff in the parking lot, too.
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Oddly enough, the Connecticut ban on non-reusable plastic bags has been somewhat successful. Only a handful of restaurants still use them for takeout, and all of the grocery stores have all migrated over to paper bags for people who forget to bring their own.
Most people are going to the store with burlap or heavy plastic reusable bags now, to avoid paying 15 cents for each bag when you're at the store.
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Paper bags use more energy to produce and occupy more space in landfills.
Besides making you feel good, is there a reason you think they're better for the environment?
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Paper is biodegradable
Paper does not degrade in landfills. It lasts for centuries.
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Well, it keeps carbon sequestrated for centuries then!/s
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if enough shopping bags were making their way to landfills then we wouldn't be having this discussion
switching to paper is a huge improvement for trash blowing around and catching in gutters and streams
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Have you ever been near a paper mill? Especially on that recycles paper? There are few industrial processes more damaging to the environment than a paper mill, including oil refineries.
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Brown paper bags can be recycled. When I asked by the at the recycling center if I could toss a huge stack of paper bags in with the boxes he chuckled and said, "You know what brown paper bags are? Just really thin cardboard!"
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> Oddly enough, the Connecticut ban on non-reusable plastic bags has been somewhat successful.
You literally go on to describe the exact thing that is happening in CA and still think it's working? The extra few people bagging their groceries in old potato sacks has nothing on the fact that the rest of the people are still tossing plastic bags that now use 5x as much plastic as the old bags. By that metric, any "ban" must reduce bag usage by 80% before it can even be break-even with the prior situation. Un
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> 9 out of 10 shoppers walking into a store with their own bags
I just wanted to reiterate that I mean every shopper, every store, every time. Not just the people who post on Slashdot and shop at Whole Foods. Put that nerd brain to some critical thinking tasks.
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I was in western Europe for months when I found they just didn't work. I have a great photo of people at Gadis just paying the few euro cents and taking home more bags. Personally, I had the issue that I often didn't have a "reusable" bag with me, so I ended up getting another. I still have them sitting otherwise unused somewhere in my house here in the US. IMO, thin bags with easy recycling is probably the best way forward. I get thin bags here and actually recycle. Recycling for them needs to be as easy a
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IMO, thin bags with easy recycling is probably the best way forward. I get thin bags here and actually recycle. Recycling for them needs to be as easy as it is for other recyclables, though I think recycling need to be easier than they are now. One container and let the people who sort this stuff for a living handle it from there because they know what they're doing.
The trouble is plastic bag recycling is largely wishcycling. I "recycle" all my plastic bags too but I have little faith that the bags I drop at store recycling boxes actually end up in products. The local recycling center doesn't even take plastic bags.
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The trouble is plastic recycling is largely wishcycling.
Plastic recycling is expensive, inferior, and largely not done [reuters.com]. The greatest trick the plastic industry ever pulled was convincing us of plastic recycling actually being done and working.
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Question is, why should we recycle plastic bags? Is it because of land-fill pollution, ocean pollution or CO2?
- Regarding CO2 we are talking about a few percent. There are plenty of much easier ways to reduce CO2, like big ships.
- Regarding ocean pollution, this happens mainly in the Asia where people just dump everything into the river. All the money you locally use to prevent ocean plastic, just figure out a way how to donate and use that in the Asia and you will get results that are many magnitudes bette-
and you end up eating & drinking it. If nothing else it ends up in the food you eat. You can't filter out the toxins, the plastic *is* a toxin. And besides it's too expensive to do that. Corners will be cut the 1st time there's a bad quarter.
The only fix is to use less of it. Which the plastic industry doesn't want. And they make the rules.
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The biggest problem with plastic recycling is that it convinces people they are "doing their part" when they drive a four-ton SUV to the recycling center to drop off five grams of grocery bags.
Recycling of aluminum and cardboard makes sense. Recycling of plastic and glass does not. We should reduce consumption instead of telling people that recycling is the solution.
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Not sure where you're getting the glass portion of that. My understanding was that glass is 100% recyclable, just the US does a shit job of doing it and delineating where it is done and where it isn't.
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There is a certain amount of material loss with glass and there is the problem with color contamination. But Americans seem to think that bottling should be done on the other side of the continent and therefore heavier glass bottles are not worth the effort.
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Correct; the metrics I have seen suggest only about 10% of plastic that is specifically put into the recycling stream ends up recycled. This of course has a lot to do with the simple fact that most plastics are either impossible or economically prohibitive to recyclable in the first place.
I personally think this will change in the near future as we get better at engineering enzymes, but this also means I that I think all efforts to do large-scale plastic recycling today are essentially just feel-good money
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It's almost as if they're trying to discourage people from reusing their bags by supplying shitty, inconvenient ones just to piss people off.
They should sell woven nylon bags for at least 1 or 2€ each: They're very lightweight, strong, & durable, easily washable, & fold/scrunch down very small, & for all these reasons very convenient & environmentally friendly. Yes, it's still plastic but if it cuts down on the total substantially, it'll do until we come up with a better idea. I had-
I gave up on the supermarket bags and bought some insulated picnic baskets six years ago. I still use them. The insulation has kinda torn on a couple of them from use and accidental rips because stuff has sharpish edges, but I just use those for stuff that doesn't need to be kept cool anyway.
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That has been tried many times. What happens is enough people throw the bags away that the net effect is even more plastic in landfills.
If a permanent bag has five times as much plastic as a single-use bag, it is losing policy if more than 20% are tossed.
Good for you. But I hope you don't believe a normal person would do that.
Policy should be based on how people behave, not on how we wish they behaved.
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Thin compostable bags are even better.
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Most places that "recycle" plastic bags either ship them overseas to India, where they're burned for cheap, heavily polluting fuel; or they burry them in the ground right alongside other trash.
These bags should be burned domestically in a vacuum incinerator/coal-like reactor and/or converted into fuel by one burning other trash.
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Belgium here. Supermarkets dropped plastic bags years ago. From memory they did this voluntary. I do not miss them. I always have a foldable box in my car. My bicycle has bags attached to its sides. You get used to it, you adapt. Just change. Small effort.
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Belguim, your beer is passable, your outward poltics about the environment is god awful.
I bought 3 1.5 L containers of ice cream for less than $10US and put it in my freezer the size of your apartment, I will get to eating it after 3 weeks or 3 years after paying 1/3 of the price of your electricity to keep it at a solid 5 below. Stop picking up the habits of goverment overlords and let people do and buy what they want within reason. Your military isnt good awful, your design is passable eurotrash an
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They banned single use plastic bags here a few years ago, initially the replacement 10 cent bags were really nice - in fact I am still using those same first 10 cent bags 3 years later. The bags do hold up they just don't look good doing it. Today the store still has bags but they are not as good, still cost 10 cents, and they hide them to where you actually have to ask for them.
Sell a good reusable attractive bag with the store's name on it and it's a marketing department win for the store. Instead they -
I'd pay a dollar per bag. Two dollars per bag for the large paper sacks that can actually hold more than 2 items per bag. I have a toddler I don't have time to keep track of reusable bags. $15/bag is probably where I would invest in reusable bags, or buy into a rental bag scheme where I can mail them back or something. Most grocery runs, all my groceries fit in three paper sacks, and yes I do prioritize stores that have paper sacks. $3 out of a $150 grocery run is almost a rounding error
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> To me it's a pity, because the 10 cent bags are good if you use and re-use them, and they are good enough to re-use.
Great news! You can buy 10 cent bags and reuse them all you want, you legend you.
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The problem (stating the obvious) is that the ban should have been to "ban all check-out bags that can not be recycled in the recycle bin"
So PET (soda bottles) made bags should have been what the reusable bags got made out of.But as the article states, I go shopping, I don't have a car, so I don't remember to take the bags. The "reusable bags" get coated in bacteria, viruses, or deteriorate in the trunk/backseat of people's cars, so they spread more diseases back into the store from being carried around. It
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We used to live above a major chain grocery store. I had my own private "shopping cart" and would elevator down, put things in the cart, check out, and then instead of putting it in bags, it just went back in the cart, and back up the elevator. There was never any question of how much I could haul back upstairs. Unfortnuately with the sole exception of a handful of neighborhoods, sidewalks universally suck and this isn't viable for about 99.99% of the population
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