Of all the “single-use” plastic items that people use every day, perhaps the one with the shortest period of usefulness are plastic shopping bags. Most people only use them during the time it takes to get home from the store; maybe ten or fifteen minutes. But those bags don’t go away. In fact, they don’t break down on any reasonable timescale and persist in the environment long after the groceries that you used them to carry need to be replaced.
Plastic shopping bags remain one of the most common items of litter around the Bay Area, polluting our communities, creeks, and the Bay itself with plastic and harmful chemicals. Bags are cheap and abundant, and lightweight so they travel easily on a breeze or through a storm drain. When littered, they harm wildlife, and contribute to microplastic pollution that we are learning more about every day.
Save The Bay has been fighting to get rid of plastic shopping bags for a long time. We organized local efforts by cities to restrict their use and supported the state’s first-in-the-nation ban on “single-use” plastic bags with the passage of SB 270 in 2014. That was an historic step toward changing our shopping behavior away from a common but unnecessary and harmful plastic item. As a result, carrying reusable shopping bags has become far more common and, despite what the industry predicted, the sky didn’t fall.
The Plastic Loophole
Unfortunately, we’re now seeing that plastic bag manufacturers found ways to get plastic film bags back at the checkout counters in stores across the state. Because the original law allowed plastic bags that were reusable and recyclable, manufacturers eventually started making shopping bags slightly thicker. That way they could claim that they were meeting the letter of the law despite evidence showing these new bags aren’t used any differently than the old, thinner bags.
CalRecycle recently certified that these new, thicker bags are in fact, not recyclable in California. Shoppers also don’t reuse them; instead, they end up as litter or in landfills just like the old ones did. Between 2018 and 2021 the volume of plastic bag waste in California grew by 50-65%! Given that, it’s time to revisit this fight and close the loophole that the industry is using to continue pushing these harmful and unnecessary bags. Luckily, we’ve got a great chance this year to do just that.
Plastic Bag Ban 2: Electric Boogaloo
Bills in the legislature to fully ban the use of plastic film shopping bags at the checkout counters are working their way through the Senate and Assembly. SB1053 (Blakespear) and AB2236 (Bauer-Kahan) would require that the only bags available at checkout are paper bags made with least 50% post-consumer recycled paper. By explicitly allowing only high-recycled content paper bags, the plastics manufacturers won’t be able to sneak through another loophole in the law.
Because they don’t break down, we often say that plastic bags never die. Given how hard the plastic industry keeps fighting to bring them back, it sometimes seems like the fight over plastic shopping bags is the policy issue that continues to come back to life. But this new legislative effort makes it clear that the days of cashiers asking, “paper or plastic?” are behind us. After it passes and is signed into law, we should finally be able to put this issue to rest.
