California governor signs law banning all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores.

Original Associated Press article instead of giving traffic to Voice of America

Edit: and a good LA Times article explaining the glaring flaw with the original 2014 law.

Which isn't the individual single use plastic bags every single item comes in.
It's just the one final plastic bag, all the other plastic bags are carried in.

I don't have a problem with the move myself. I'm single, with a supermarket just up the street. I use my own hand basket for my groceries. I never even use a cart.
But this policy always strikes me a tackling the smallest, least effective part of the problem. Banning plastic packaging would be FAR more effective. But also much harder. So this is just a way for politicians to seem like they are doing something, when they really aren't. In other words it's pandering.

good. My balls are already maxed out on microplastics

We did it a while back, you will adapt pretty quickly.

Can we ban plastics in the fishing industry next?

I remember save the trees campaign years ago. I'm convinced it was all started by the plastic industry.

In Austria, we banned plastic bags ~ 5 years ago. We only have paper bags that are ~ 70c each. Before that we had 30c plastic bags.

Oh, and that is the price per bag. People here just get some high quality bags, baskets… and use them over and over.

As long as it also requires them to carry paper bags that's perfect

Crafty people: If you don't already, you should learn about plarn, aka yarn made from cut up disposable plastic shopping bags.

My wife makes it and turns it into forever bags.

https://warpedfibers.com/plastic-bag-yarn/

Excellent! Now, please ban single use plastics in most consumer packaging. We devised solutions to many of these for centuries or longer before most stuff went to plastic unnecessarily. Very little actually requires single-use plastic.

My gf got me into bringing my own grocery bags and after a few times forgetting to bring them in, I got used to it. Now it’s automatic and can’t see doing it any other way.

Great to see this. I have not seen someone bring their own bags except me in months.

In Seattle we did this years ago. In practice, people just treat the new "reusable" bags as disposable. This law is a stop gap and ultimately kicks the can down thr road to placate business interests and the bullshit plastic lobby.

Bring on the downvotes, folks, but the reality is that now people will be throwing away thicker plastic.

Great! Now do other 49.

Nice to see California catching up to Colorado.

We did this in Austin, and I hate it. It's probably fine if you go to the store and use your own totes, but my situation requires that I have to get my groceries delivered, so that isn't an option for me. And instead of plastic bags which I could crumple up to take up near-zero space and actually reuse, my house is filled with enormous paper bags that have already ripped before I got the groceries up the stairs in the first place and take up tons of space and have basically zero reuse value and go straight into the trash after one use. I used to reuse plastic shopping bags all the time; waste basket liners, collecting random odds and ends to throw away together, organizing and storing dozens of random cables and chargers, etc.

I wish there was a better way to dispose of plastic bags. Because while I understand the reasonings for the ban, the result is majorly inconvenient and ironically results in more single-use products in my life.

They did this in ny. I never remember to bring a bag. I walk to everything and I'm not always planning on going shopping so I end up with a garbage bag filled with reusable bags that I end up thowing away. I get why they're doing it but I hate it. Groceries cost enough as it is. I don't see why we should care about the environment. Humans are terrible. The faster we go extinct, the better. 😖

We tried that. It failed.

for us there is a law that if there is one item they wont give us plastic bags

Good and the Europeans have been doing this for this decades.

There was a plastic bag ban here* in my state. Still is technically. The only problem is the idiots who shoved this through left exceptions/loopholes that allowed basically every technically rural place here able to keep using plastic bags as long as they’re “reusable” which basically just made much thicker plastic bags be the norm. It’s fucking stupid and we need to forever go back to paper.