NJ had a single use plastic bag tax. To get around it companies increased the thickness of plastic bags and gave it for free. Apparently the thickness is what separated a single use bag with a reusable one. Politicians are clowns đ¤Ą.
It's supposed to be a game of cat and mouse, but right now the cat isn't even trying. I think what's needed is some sort of 'living legislation' that constantly updates to close loopholes that stakeholders find in it. Iirc this should be possible in common law systems with deliberately vague laws whose interpretation keeps getting updated by court cases.
Same up in Connecticut. I have so many crappy "reusable" plastic bags from Target pickup orders during the height of the pandemic. I can't bring myself to get rid of them because they're "reusable", so I use them to hold donations for the thrift store and get rid of them that way. I also use them as packing material.
I have other, nicer bags I use when I go to shopping.
I would envision a plastic tax that is based on weight of the material created. Every ounce costs $.10.Make the producer last. Same with Styrofoam. That money could be funneled back to some green initiative.
Unfortunately, the plastic tax is enacted in terms of climate upheavals, and levied upon the poorest people in the world, usually in some other nation entirely rather than the originator.:-(
Except "we" (imperial nations) don't want to pay that, generally speaking.
Notably, some places do think of such things though, and do have such taxes in place. Though conservatives are now in charge in many places in the world, so these are the local hold-outs against an overwhelming global trend.