California governor signs law banning all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores.
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.
Thank you!
Yeah np; VOA is I feel overall pretty tame as national propaganda outlets go, but it's nonetheless expressly conceived of and funded as a propaganda outlet, so that's not much of a compliment.
Plus, a news agency article from its own website tends to have a better shelf life than syndicated versions of that article.
We did it a while back, you will adapt pretty quickly.
Portland’s done it too. If you want plastic bags, they’re big and reusable and fairly expensive. Paper is really the only option at most places now. That said, I really wanna see the reusable cheap plastic ones banned, cause no one really reuses them.
They banned single use a decade ago. My family switched to reusable bags. A lot of stores realized that they could sell “reusable” plastic bags, thicker single use bags, and get around the law.
So the rollout went like this, stores gives you free plastic bags your entire life, about a week where people were told “no plastic bags, you gotta bring your own,” then the plastic bags were back but a bit different and the store would sometimes charge you a bag fee (although a lot of places effectively waived the fee). This meant that no one adapted and they continued doing what people had always done with their plastic bags, sone reuse, mostly discard.
People always complain about unintended consequences of laws, I’ve always gotten the impression from those people they would prefer we don’t make the laws. I would love it though if we could iterate on our laws faster than, pass the law, every company finds a loophole a week later, close loophole after a decade of unintended consequences.
And yea, having reusable bags is not difficult.
I just wish they would ban the plastic bags and force paper bags. The thick plastic bag problem came from not mandating paper only. Plus a lot of those polyester bags were so poorly made, they didn't last long enough to male a difference.
Maybe it's just me wanting to go back to the stores of my youth when plastic was a rarity.
Can we ban plastics in the fishing industry next?
I know little to nothing about fishing on a commercial scale. What are viable alternatives to plastics in that 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.
I remember save the trees campaign years ago. I'm convinced it was all started by the plastic industry.
Yup. Logging industry, at least in the US, is remarkably renewable. I remember reading that we have significantly more trees than we did 100 years ago because we’ve improved logging methods. No more clear cutting for pulp or lumber, proper replanting, and age-tracking for proper harvest.
In other words, saying “don’t use paper, save a tree” is akin to saying “don’t eat fries, save a potato.”
We have more trees, yes, but we have fewer forests.
Forests are where the biodiversity is. Not monoculture straight-row tree farms.
And we've gotten rid of a lot of old growth forests before we came into renewable forestry. That's partly why lumber these days isn't as good (quality, in general) as it was 50 or 100 years ago.
And we're still tearing down old forests. This time, it's to grow soy to feed to cows.
While this is true, we should also remember that old growth forest, not tree plantations, are the most efficient at sequestering carbon and filtering/storing water.
Just because the timber industry is has been adopting renewable aspects, doesn't justify expanding it recklessly. Reducing demand and recycling as much paper as possible is still a key part of keeping our usage sustainable. Even if the trees grow back, there is still energy being lost to harvesting and processing. Tree falls are a major source of carbon sequestration in forests, which enrich the soil. If the trees are being harvested, that piece of the local cycle stops. I try to vary the locations that I collect kindling wood in my back woods so as not to deplete any area.
Trees are the most visible and obvious carbon sink. You can watch a tree grow over a few years by literally sucking carbon out of thin air. I live in a bog where the trees all fall down after a few years. Quite a few come down every windy season. You can see how they shape the landscape, dam waterflow, and turn into soil mounds. The dammed water helps to trap more plant matter and sequester more carbon. Removing the trees from this ecosystem by harvesting would interrupt this process. This process maintains the soil fertility. The trees still grow back for now, but our lack of consideration for soil health and for soil as a carbon sink reminds me of our attitude towards conventional industrial agriculture. If we keep treating the soil like this, will the trees keep growing back in 50 years without requiring artificial fertilizers and water filtration to replace the trees we extract?
Canada works pretty well without them. If you forget your bags though you have to buy more.
I keep several reusable bags and I've almost never had to use the paper ones. The few times I have, the bags fell apart halfway home lol.
In France they didn't always have bags available, and if they did they were usually for sale and were reusable. Everyone just brought their own bags.
As long as you don't expect them to be free
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.
I'm sorry.
If you want to make them, for the sake of making them. As an art project or something, that's fine I guess.
But as a functional blanket? That seems like the worst thing I can imagine.
Ok? First of all, the site says that it uses plarn for part of the weaving. Secondly, you don't have weave with it or make a blanket. As I said, my wife knits them into forever bags.
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.
I don't consider petrochemical wax paper much better and that's what they were using before for many things like meat. Glass would be good though.
Even just food aside, we use so much plastic for things like LED light bulb packaging, toys, packing materials like bubble wrap and air bags, monobags for clothes, plastic shrink wrap or uncuttable plastics at hardware stores, markets, etc.
Like, outside of sterile single use plastics for keeping needles clean at the doctor, and maybe certain biohazards like raw meat juice, we don't really need most plastics in consumer applications. Balsa wood, cardboard, metals, glass, rubber, paper, and waxed paper can do much of the heavy lifting.
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.
I used to forget my bags all the time until I got some actual nice bags made for groceries. They’re way bigger, sturdy enough to hold anything, and can stand freely as I load groceries in them. I don’t forget them now.
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.
Those are the bags this law bans.
Yeah no. Plastic bags given in the UK were around 8.5 billion in 2014, which reduced to under half a billion by 2023 just from introducing a charge.
In Hawaii every county did it independently around 10 years ago. Some counties have done it better than others. I don’t think I’ve had a single plastic bag on the big island in that entire time, but when I’m on Oahu I occasionally get them (for example the Apple Store thicker plastic bags that are “reusable”—somewhat true).
I don’t see people treating reusable bags as disposable, but it’s also completely acceptable here to just bring a cart full of stuff unbagged from target to your car here if you didn’t bring bags (groceries people will get paper if they forgot). I don’t think that’s as acceptable other places.
That doesn't line up with my experience. Canada banned single-use bags in 2023, and I notice a lot less reusable bags discarded on the street than the single-use ones before the ban.
That depends on how Canada implemented their plastic bag ban.
California's ban allowed "reusable" bags, which the plastics industry interpreted to produce bags that looked a lot like the thin single use bags, but of thicker plastic, and consumer habits weren't changed by much.
In Austin, most grocery stores switched to paper and sold canvas when we had our ban. Only Texas’ beloved H‑E‑B decided to sell thick plastic replacement bags and has continued to do so post-ban. Hopefully the California law counts these stupid thick bags as plastic in their ban.
Those stupid thick bags are exactly the 2014 loophole that this 2024 ban is closing.
Grocery Outlet in IB and CV both offer plastic bags to me even as I am putting my backpack, or one of their reusable bags on the counter.
Not sure about north of San Diego, though.
For anyone wondering why a new law would target reusable bags as well, the phrasing of the old law basically encouraged stores to replace single use plastic bags with reusable plastic bags. Reusable bags use more plastic so they're sturdier and last longer, but they were treated as single use bags anyways so functionally we were just producing and subsequently wasting more plastic.
I haven't read this new law but hopefully it encourages or requires actually using paper bags or cardboard boxes or something if you don't have your own reusable bag. It would be a shame if it just kicks the can down the road again and people buy reusable bags in the checkout aisle that they throw away when they get home instead of keeping in the car.
Great! Now do other 49.
Colorado has had this law for a couple years now
Hawaii hasn't had plastic bags for almost a decade at this point. Styrofoam takeout containers have also been banned since around COVID.
Some stores let you buy a paper bag for a few cents, otherwise it's reusable bags you bring. Takeout containers have all transitioned to cardboard or PLA containers.
Austin tried years ago and Texas said no.
Nice to see California catching up to Colorado.
Ah, Lemmy with the backhanded compliments - at best
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.
While single-use packaging isn't always ideal, we aren't exactly fighting a battle with micro-paper pollution. It biodegrades comparatively simply.
One possible suggestion, is it possible for you to get a reusable collapsing basket to keep downstairs for carrying groceries?
I use a single plastic bag for few months, it fits in a back pocket if you fold it nicely, and it's rainproof. All the fabric ones make a bulge in the pocket or don't fit at all.
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. 😖
The number of "reusable" bags I now encounter in the environment that contain way more plastic than the disposable ones (and can't be used as garbage bags so now other disposable bags are created/used instead) makes me really skeptical banning plastic bags helps at all
There are other reusable bag options that are not plastic. I'm also strongly opposed to the reusable bag options which supermarkets offer because most are platic but you can get plenty of nice cotton or hessian material type bags around.
I'm a bag fan of banning single use plastic but it should definitely go to the extent of even reusable plastic because its been demonstrated that reusable plastic options aren't that much more sustainable.
We tried that. It failed.
When was that? I remember the vote where it was an option and it didn't win. Instead we got the joys of paying $0.10 per bag and thicker bags.
But is bringing your own bags with you so hard? My parents are too old remember that but I never had an issue with it.
Grocery bags were banned. Durable "reusable" plastic bags were mandated and we were expected to re-use those bags and return them to the store. The reality is that we use them just like the old bags and just fork over the extra 10 cents for every visit.
This article is claiming the exact same thing, replacing the current "re-usable" bags with more durable "re-usable" bags that we will likely now pay 20 cents for and be expected to re-use them at the store.
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.
Nah, fabric. And more grocery stores but smaller and locally owned so people don't need to do a bunch of shopping at once. And proper pay and worker protections and price controls so people can afford to have time to shop
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.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Like @TheTechnician27@lemmy.world said, this is closing a loophole that was in the original grocery bag reduction law.
I'm saying it shouldn't be praised as a solution, but recognized as a very small step forward. Afterwhich we ramp up the pressure for real solutions.
We can't afford to think like this. Climate is such an unthinkably massive issue that we need all of it, and then some more, and then some more.
There is no project big enough that we don't need 50,000 more projects of equivalent scope to get things where they need to be.
Think like what? Think this is just one small pice. Small enough that it almost doesn't matter, and shouldn't take any energy or news inches from the larger problem of plastic packaging? Because honestly, it sounds like we're on the same page there.
Also plastics aren't much of a climate issue. They're part of a more broad environmental issue.
California has been working toward legislation that reduces plastic in packaging. It's not as good as it should be, but it represents about as much departure from the status quo I think California can reasonably get when people raise so much fuss over even superfluous things like plastic straws and grocery bags (and because California is already really throwing around their weight here in compelling out-of-state producers to change their manufacturing). And this new law is just closing a loophole on a 2014 law that at worst was actively making things worse or at best was making the law fail to address the issue. This isn't "pandering"; it's addressing a real, ongoing, actual issue in a sensible way.
Excellent! That should be bigger news than this little stuff.
Yeah. The whole shit-show is depressing really.
Firstly, you're entirely correct - it's a tiny part of the problem.
Secondly, it shifts the "blame" for plastic on to consumers. "Oh we've been so bad all this time using plastic shopping bags".
Thirdly, it provides a feeling of resolution. "I'm so happy now we've done the hard work to buy these $0.10 reusable shopping bags and solved the plastic problem".
Fourthly, you have to wonder how many plastic shopping bags were actually single use. For example, a lot of them were made from recycled plastic, and a lot of them were re-used as garbage bags, which are now purchased anyway.
On balance, I think it's within the realm of possibility that these laws do more harm than good. Honestly, just tax plastic producers and see how quickly producers using plastic to package their products magically fine innovative new alternatives.
This literal exact sentence tells me you didn't read past the headline; those shitty $0.10, thicker "reusable" plastic bags are exactly the loophope in the 2014 ban that this 2024 law is designed to close. The thing you're accusing this law of allowing people to do is the one thing it expressly outlaws. Media literacy is dead.
Seriously. The way to solve this is to simply put a tax on all plastic packaging. Use those funds to subsidize plastic recycling. Set the tax at whatever level is necessary to make recycling viable. And if the most viable 'recycling' method is to just burn the plastic in an incinerator, so be it. Yeah, it's expensive to build an industrial incinerator that can properly scrub and filter out all the nasty fumes plastic gives off when it's burned. But it can be done. It's more expensive than just stuffing the plastic in a landfill, but by burning it, we solve our plastic problem in the here and now, rather than letting it slowly leach out into the environment for future generations to deal with.
Recycling plastic will always be difficult, and it may never be practical for some cases. But all plastics burn. And if you have the right incinerator, they can be burned without releasing toxic fumes into the air. Tax plastic packaging, all of it. Tax it, and use the funds to subsidize plastic waste incineration. Plastic is made from oil, and it still can be used as a fuel. Burn it and be done with it.
Packaging is more effective to ban but also a lot more nuanced. Plastic packaging was developed over a lot of years and the products are designed for it so it would need to be a much longer term project.
All the more reason to advocate for it, and not be distracted by a nearly meaningless win.
What do you do wrt vegetables? I always end up using those thin plastic bag to wrap them, even uf I bring a big reusable bag to carry it all out
I have a hand-held basket I got more than a decade ago from Staples. I just put all the loose fruit and veg in that.
Looking at comments outside of Lemmy, I'm appaled by the number of people shocked by this already. Apparently, "just reuse your f-ing bags" is already too hard for a lot of people. We need to start from the easiest.
Banning these plastics is not about environmentalism. It's about litter and having visually cleaner cities.
It seems easy to argue liter is part of environmental concerns and policy. Environment is a very flexible term.