California’s long statewide nightmare might soon be over. The current generation of plastic bags are in line to be banned just as their predecessors were.
Ten years after Sacramento outlawed single-use plastic bags (with the help of a majority of voters two years later in a referendum), legislators have approved a ban on the multi-use bags that took their place, with each chamber passing a bill that, in identical language, prohibits “a reusable grocery bag sold by a store to a customer at the point of sale” from being “made from plastic film material.”
Stores would be allowed to provide customers who forget to bring their reusable bags – and those who refuse on principle to use them – with paper sacks. But they will have to be, beginning on Jan. 1, 2028, made “from a minimum of 50% postconsumer recycled materials.” The paper bags will have to cost at least 10 cents each.
Neither bill is law yet. But the ban will be in effect after the formalities of the legislative process are completed.
Sen. Catherine Blakespear, the Encinitas Democrat who authored Senate Bill 1053, said the state’s “original ban on plastic bags hasn’t worked out as planned, and sadly, the state’s plastic bag waste has increased dramatically since it went into effect.”
Maybe the volume “increased dramatically” because the thin single-use bags were replaced by heavier multi-use bags, which are at least four times thicker.
“The amount of plastic bag waste discarded per person (by weight) actually increased in the years following the law’s implementation to the highest level on record – proving the ban ineffective at reducing the total amount of plastic waste,” says a report compiled by multiple organizations, one of them the Naderite U.S. Public Interest Group.
Nevertheless, Blakespear said “we need to do better,” because “shockingly, some 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year from coastal regions alone. California must do its part to eliminate this scourge that is contaminating our environment.”
Did she or anyone else consider that rather than ban a consumer convenience the better course would have been to enforce litter laws and boost public anti-litter campaigns, which have been successful in the past?
The author of Assembly Bill 2236 probably said a little too much, admitting that her legislation was a battle in the California war on oil.
“Plastics are the next front in our fight against Big Oil. By 2050, plastic production will exceed 20 percent of global oil production,” said Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda. “AB 2236 is a critical step to eliminate plastic pollution, and eliminates an opportunity for the oil industry to continue destroying our planet.”
At least 6,000 products – many of them plastic goods that are critical to our health care and extend our lives – are made from a barrel of crude oil. Does Bauer-Kahan think that shutting down plastic bag production in a single state is going to have even a minuscule impact on oil extraction? Manufacturers need about 12 million barrels a year to make plastic bags in this country. The U.S. alone produces nearly 13 million barrels of crude each day.
Of course, a sense of proportion is never included when eco-ideology is being followed.
The New York Times reported earlier this year that according to “some accounts, California’s initial plastic bag ban was a well-meaning but failed experiment, an environmental rule that backfired and inadvertently made the matter worse.” To paraphrase Mark Murray, director of Californians Against Waste, the prohibitionists just didn’t see it coming.
“It just didn’t seem like” the thicker bags “were going to be the thing that they ultimately became,” he told the Times.
Is there any reason to think that this latest ban won’t contain some surprises? No, none whatsoever.
Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.
