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.
LOL my wife would come home with brand new plant liners. WTF! You can just vacuum form these things and reuse them as furniture.
can you give me two paragraphs on this? i am really interested but i do not know what you’re saying.
I’m just agreeing with the post. My wife went from bringing countless things plastic bags to bringing countless thick plastic bags. The mindset of re-use was limited to using the bags to toss baby diapers. But not actually to keep using the bag over and over for bringing groceries home.
put the stack of thick plastic bags in your car, you will progressivly think about taking some with you when going groceries
thank you
If only the bags were significantly more expensive people would actually start to care and reuse the bags. Where in from the bags cost the equivalent to 2-3 dollars. A lot of people started using fabric bags and reuse the thicker plastic bags many times. I can easily use the thick plastic grocery bags we have 20 times and the fabric ones I mainly use are over 5 years now and counting.
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.
Or the bags are too cheap.
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
now plastic bags are no longer free - but honestly $0.15/bag is basically free so most folks still toss them out.
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.
My city banned plastic bags and it costs 10 cents for paper bags so you definitely see a lot more cloth bags being brought in. Just at grocery stores, you still get take out in plastic bags every so often but most places just switched to all paper
I did notice an option at Kroger or maybe it was Walmart when you do pickup they won’t use plastic bags. I have a big shopping basket I accidentally liberated from the store years ago that stays in the back of the car they put the stuff in.
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.
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.
Coming from a country that did this ages ago for stupid reasons.
Wait until they come for your straws. Cutting down trees for paper bags I can deal with but fucking paper straws (Mcdonalds im looking at you) is god awful.
There are compostable straws that work quite well. Also maybe just use a metal straw, or bring your own cup, no need to have disposable everything.
Metal straw I can get bahind but other straw types just dont make it to market because money. Personally just take the lid off and use a cup like an adult.
God the fictional line of just bring your own cup. No one brings their own cup to Mcdonalds. No one. They dont accept them now anyway. Their soda machines are automated for their own cups. Their trajectory is hire less people buy more robots.
That is such an idiotic loophole there is no way in hell it wasn’t bought by lobbyists
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?)….
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 !
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
