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California law bans all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores

37 points by geox 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
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gottorf 2y ago
As I understand it, research done on communities that have banned plastic shopping bags found that overall plastic bag consumption didn't change appreciably. People were in the habit of reusing such bags as garbage bags and whatnot, and when they were banned, they bought other plastic bags to serve that purpose. My own experiences mirror this. Small sample size, but no one I know just throws away a plastic shopping bag after groceries are carried in; they always get reused.
- ravenstine 2y ago
  When plastic bags in CA began to get regulated last decade, I remember the reasoning being that the bags were floating away in the wind and getting into the environment. Conserving plastic wasn't the major motivator, but perhaps I'm misremembering.
  - thghtihadanacct 2y ago
    Before the first ban went into effect I would see plastic bags caught in all the fencing, especially near the railroad. Now I see none and its beautiful. Im willing to let others be inconvenienced to see these gone.
    - dangsucksdick1 2y ago
      [dead]
    - animal_spirits 2y ago
      You're willing to make others pay more for food*
      - thghtihadanacct 2y ago
        id be more than willing to help them find reusable bags. Youre willing to litter the landscape with trash?
- squigz 2y ago
  I've acquired many, many reusable bags, and countless plastic bags. I also have normal garbage bags to use. At this point, I throw away most plastic bags I get. Otherwise I'd simply be inundated with plastic bags! Anyway I much prefer the reusable (fabric) bags. Much stronger, larger, easier to carry.
  - NBJack 2y ago
    Do you have any advice on how to keep the fabric ones clean? I've been concerned about food contamination over time (i.e. raw meats that leak, etc.).
    - squigz 2y ago
      Hmmm... Good point that I should keep in mind in the future :D I would assume throwing at least some of them in the laundry would work well enough, or even just hand washing, but I guess that'll depend on the material itself.
    - ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
      You are already well-acquainted with machines that wash fabric.
      - squigz 2y ago
        Is the snark necessary?
        misswest 2y ago
        Is this sanctimony?
        dangsucksdick1 2y ago
        [dead]
        vel0city 2y ago
        When people act like washing fabrics are some mystical and not well understood concept, sure. Or do most people also just wear single-use disposable clothing as well? Should we just assume people don't know how to do laundry?
- AlwaysRock 2y ago
  > State Sen. Catherine Blakespear, one of the bill’s supporters, said people were not reusing or recycling any plastic bags. She pointed to a state study that found that the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed per person grew from 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms) per year in 2004 to 11 pounds (5 kilograms) per year in 2021. It looks like lots of people did toss plastic bags, even the thicker ones, away after one use. I wasnt living in CA but the thicker plastic bags were just thicker disposable bags to many people.
  - jchmbrln 2y ago
    I wonder how much of that growth is because the bags themselves are so much thicker/heavier now. It would be interesting to compare count vs. weight. It looks like the new, thick bags are 5x thicker than the old, thin ones (0.5 mils vs 2.5 mils) [0]. 11lb is a lot less than 5x 8lb, so the per-person bag trashing must be drastically lowered, unless weight and thickness aren’t correlated. [0] https://1bagatatime.com/learn/what-is-a-mill/ https://1bagatatime.com/learn/what-is-a-mill/
- jchmbrln 2y ago
  This was my first thought on seeing the title as well. My entire life I and every family member I can think of has used plastic grocery bags for our little bathroom trash cans. I don’t even know what the options are for “real” bags of that size, having never shopped for them. Time to learn, I guess. That said, this could still reduce my plastic use. The old, thin bags were sufficient. The new, thick bags have been overkill since day one. Given that the frequency with which I take out the trash didn’t change when the thin bags were banned, I’m sure I use quite a bit more plastic than before the ban. Maybe bags sold for small trash cans are thinner, and I’ll go back to pre-ban levels of use.
- zbrozek 2y ago
  Yeah, I stopped getting to reuse plastic grocery bags as wastebasket liners and started buying dedicated liners. And even in the old days when the disposable plastic bags were still available here, I would bring back any bags I wasn't using as wastebasket liners and reuse them until they broke. IIRC, the stated purpose at the time was to reduce plastic bags blowing in the wind. But I didn't see a lot of that before the rules, nor do I see much of it in US places that don't have sun a ban. It seems more correlated to general cultural tidiness than to rules around bags. Japan loves plastic bags and I basically don't see any litter anywhere there. But I did see a lot of them out in the environment in Cambodia and Vietnam.
- scoofy 2y ago
  The point isn't to reduce plastic use. It's to reduce the amount of plastics that end up in our waterways and the ocean. If everyone was reusing their plastic bags as waste bags... even if people who used plastic bags just threw them away, this wouldn't be an issue at all. The point of this is people don't throw them away, and they tend to end up as litter that ends up in storm drains or in Coastal California, just blow into the ocean. It makes perfectly good sense to want to ban plastic grocery bags in coastal states and keep them in inland states.
scohesc 2y ago
I would always store/re-use the thin plastic grocery bags for trashbins, storage bags for miscellaneous things/junk, etc. etc. Yeah, we probably collected too many over time, and then got fed up and shoved the mass of plastic bags from the drawer into the garbage and into the landfills. The new plastic ones, I always forget to bring, end up buying 2-3 new ones for $1.25 each - which I'm sure the store has a decent margin on - and then they sit in the house - too "nice" to be used for garbage or any other purposes, so they sit there and eventually get thrown out. And then you have the previous generation, who moved from paper to plastic to save the environment - whether that was a lobbying campaign from "big oil" to use more plastic, or a well intentioned grassroots movement that grew to make big change. So now we're back to paper. I wonder if I'll live long enough for a new revolutionary material to come to market and we quickly move to replace the current material. (hemp fiber bags maybe?)
- AlwaysRock 2y ago
  We started leaving a handful of reusable bags in the car which made it easier to remember to reuse them. It was harder to remember when we walked to the grocery store.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    In the winter when I was visiting New York, I would try to always have a couple of bags in my coat.
bko 2y ago
I've written about this before as my home state of NJ enforced a similar ban a little while ago. In our case, they banned paper bags as well! It all points to a larger question: who is writing these laws?? It's such an anti-human law. It makes your life considerably worse off in a noticeable way. And it doesn't actually reduce waste, but makes things worse. Here is a few things that happened: - Reusable bags have to be reused dozens of times to make up for the additional environmental impact, so damage likely went up - People have to pay more to buy more expensive plastic bags to carry their goods that are ironically also wrapped in plastic. - Whole Foods home delivery had to send you more sturdy and expensive "reusable" bags. Just what the typical Whole Foods home delivery patron needs, about a dozen reusable bags delivered to them every week - People started stealing hand held shopping baskets It really doesn't bode well for the political process that politicians can force these ham fisted reactionary laws at a considerably cost to nearly all denizens for absolutely no purpose. https://mleverything.substack.com/p/new-jersey-bans-paper-bags https://mleverything.substack.com/p/new-jersey-bans-paper-ba... https://mleverything.substack.com/p/an-update-on-new-jerseys-paper-bag https://mleverything.substack.com/p/an-update-on-new-jerseys...
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Banning across the board is stupid. In Washington state, you can buy plastic bags for $0.08. Enough to incentivize most people to bring their own bag, not enough to cause adverse consequences because a bag is only $0.08 in the event you don’t bring a bag.
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Who decides that a bag is worth $0.08, and where does that $0.08 go when a bag is purchased?
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      The cost of the bag has to be $0.08 plus sales tax at minimum. https://ecology.wa.gov/waste-toxics/reducing-recycling-waste/plastics/plastic-bag-ban https://ecology.wa.gov/waste-toxics/reducing-recycling-waste... > Where does the 8-cent fee on paper and reusable bags go? >Businesses collect and keep the entire 8 cents to recover some of the cost of providing the bags and to incentivize customers to bring their own reusable bags. The charge must be shown as a taxable sale on the receipt provided to the customer. Businesses may choose to charge more than 8 cents per bag. My above comment is technically incorrect because there is an across the board ban on thin, single use plastic bags. But it’s not super inconvenient or costly to have to pay $0.08 (the only price for bags I have ever seen). However, that price might go up in the future because the regulations call for even thicker bags in Jan 2026, which I did not know. > In January 2026, the minimum thickness requirement will increase from 2.25 mil to 4 mil.
chollida1 2y ago
Ontario has had this law for a while now. Its occasionally inconvenient when you drop by the grocery store unplanned and have no bags, but is really a big nothing burger. Just means we end up with more and more useless shopping bags at our front door, which almost seems worse than single use ones that end up becoming garbage bags for the kitchen. Now we end up buying single use plastic bags for our kitchen and bathroom garbage and end up with more and more reusable plastic bags. So the single use plastic bags still get used at the same rate, just now I purchase them separately for garbage and we end up with more and more reusable plastic bags, which I'm guessing are worse for the environment. These laws so far don't seem to be very well thought out.
rurp 2y ago
I am basically the core demographic that this sort of law should appeal to. I try to always bring reusable bags to the store, even though I live in a not-very-green city where half of the cashiers look surprised and confused by such a thing. In general I wish that we were doing far more to conserve the environment. But I think that this is a dumb law. The problem is that the benefit:annoyance ratio is terrible. Plastic bags are bad for environment and using fewer is better, but the benefits of a blanket ban will be very modest and the annoyance to everyday people is significant. The unpleasant reality is that political capital is a big factor in getting things done in a democracy, and people should be mindful of how it's spent. Most voters are indifferent or mildly in favor of protecting the environment; they will go along with environmental goals as long as they don't perceive them as harming their quality of life too much. And that's fine. This means that highly visible and inconvenient policies that tinker around the edges are the opposite of what environmentalists should be aiming for. Unfortunately politicians often aren't trying to fix a problem, they want to appear to be fixing a problem, which is how we end up with performative legislation. Which then wraps the issue up in the usual culture war nonsense, opponents dig in, and more meaningful policies get blocked.
- scoofy 2y ago
  Ehh... I have to push back here. Any annoyance ratio is one that collapses for the next generation. Ask any child about whether we should allow plastic bags that pollute our water tables and oceans or paper bags that don't, and pretty much every kid will say paper. It's the obvious choice if you're not habituated to plastic. There are lots and lots of types of inexpensive bags we could use that don't actively fuck up our waterways. Plastic bag advocates just like to pretend those don't exist because it's expedient. The same thing happened when we phased out styrofoam.
  - autoexec 2y ago
    > Ask any child about whether we should allow plastic bags that pollute our water tables and oceans or paper bags that don't, and pretty much every kid will say paper. I suspect that'll have a lot to do with the fact that children don't go grocery shopping, and don't have to carry a bunch of items from cars, up stairs, and into their homes. They also don't give even a passing thought to the plastic bags being regularly re-used as bin liners in the home, or re-used to pick up after their dogs while on walks, or re-used for transporting items to other people's houses. Paper bags are not a reasonable alternative to plastic bags for heavy loads, wet/soiled things, times when you need to carry more than one (or maybe two) bags at a time, etc. Is it possible to manufacture an alternative bag that accomplishes all of the things that plastic bags do today? Maybe. Is such as bag widely available for the same cost? Nope. If plastic bag ban advocates want everyone onboard they'd do better to make sure that viable alternatives which are, at a minimum, at least as good as plastic bags are ready to fill in the void. Until that's the case it's going to be a massive pain to just ban what works. If plastic shopping bags were "banned" where I live, I'd just find myself needing to pay for plastic shopping bags which used to be free because I still don't have anything to replace their utility for many tasks. That'd mean that I'm producing the same amount of plastic waste as before, only now I'd be paying more and be inconvenienced in the process. Even when it comes to shopping bags used purely for shopping, many of the reusable canvas bags I've seen at stores don't hold as many items as plastic bags do, don't have handles that are as long/useful, and inconvenience me by requiring me to always have them with me and to know, in advance, how many I'm going to end up needing on every trip to the store. If you want to get people to give something up, you can spend a ton of energy and time beating the public into compliance with sticks and shaming them until they begrudgingly give up something they want, or you can just offer them something better in which case all the work is done for you. The transition from styrofoam to plastic accomplished that. No one has offered up something better.
deleted 2y ago
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greenavocado 2y ago
Ocean plastic waste is terrible and a good proxy for cultural attitudes to discarding plastics in general and the United States is in the absolute minority of regions in the world regarding plastic pollution. South East Asia is indisputably the main problem when it comes to harmful practices around plastic waste disposal. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/161rmp9/the_sources_of_oceans_plastic_pollution/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/161rmp9/the_source... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic-waste-pollution-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...
JohnMakin 2y ago
This was a very predictable result, correctly predicted by climate activists 10 years ago that were shouted down by the grocer lobbies and the faux greenwashing climate "activists" that accused them of stopping "progress". It was so easy to see: - meaningless 5 cent bag surcharge that no one would notice other than the initial outrage, and not enough to fund anything meaningful about plastic waste removal at scale - much heavier plastic bags - no incentive for consumer behavior to change Like, what else did they expect other than plastic waste to increase?
matteoraso 2y ago
Given how HN always freaks out about microplastics, I'm surprised that people feel like this is a bad law. Personally, I want a Rwanda-style ban on plastic.
snakeyjake 2y ago
Several counties in Maryland (the non "yee-haw" ones that border the Chesapeake) have banned plastic bags. Styrofoam has been banned statewide for several years. The amount of plastic and expanded polystyrene foam trash I pull out of the water and off the shore on Bay Cleanup days has fallen so drastically that it is almost unbelievable. What hasn't fallen is the sky. Or our freedom. Or the ability to clean out litter boxes. I'm a watershed steward and meetings and networking events I have found that my experience has been shared with almost every other steward I've talked to. Even those who look after waterways outside of the bag ban area have benefitted because most of the population lies within a bag ban area. If single-use plastic bottles were banned there would be practically no plastic debris in the Bay.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Its incredible how much trash in our waterways are single-use water bottles and plastic bags. It was one thing I really noticed when I visited Quebec recently. There was practically none of the plastic bag trash stuck all over every twig around the creeks and rivers like what I see in most other places.
radicality 2y ago
I’m in NYC where we similarly have dumb anti-plastic laws that are more political than actually for the environment. Oh the straws are paper now? All right, I’m gonna take 5 then because I’ll need to swap it out around every 5 min. At the grocery store? Everything needs to be double or triple bagged so it doesn’t fall apart. Are that many paper bags (trees) even encmvironmentaly friendly? NYC is a walking city, and I vividly remember someone once walking with a paper grocery bag, and then everything falling out onto the sidewalk as the bag broke during a light drizzle.
- zug_zug 2y ago
  5 paper straws is probably better for the environment than one plastic straw.
  - klyrs 2y ago
    Bzzt, they're coated in PFAS; they might be worse.
  - ProllyInfamous 2y ago
    I love when I saw my first paper straw: wrapped in plastic.
- com2kid 2y ago
  Bamboo straws are awesome. Most places around me just stopped using straws. Only kids drinks and boba get straws now days.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
I suppose the legislation around here has gone through a couple iterations, but I don't really know. Decades ago I would make grocery runs on the bus, just carry an empty backpack and perhaps another bag, stuff them tightly full, and any overflow was in disposable bags. Only as much as I could carry. I also received weird looks and attitudes at certain stores when I'd check out with a duffel bag on the conveyor belt. The checker would grimace and exhibit disdain and a reluctance to even touch the filthy thing? Gee, sorry. It often resulted in "pack my own goods" rather than a bagger willing to do it for me. My appreciation for expert, efficient baggers has grown immensely. I started picking up reusable totes where I shopped. They're all branded! So I'd feel weird being disloyal and packing the "wrong" tote at a different store. Shame led me to purchase a variety of totes everywhere I shopped... overkill! And, as others have mentioned, I often shop on a whim and unprepared, so those fancy bags all get left at home, 80% of the time, and I come home with more disposables. The disposables can really add up. You may find yourself hoarding if you think that you can reuse them. I clamped a limit on bag storage, and gleefully discard excess ones. I took note when my farmer's market switched from disposables, to slightly thicker plastic touted as "reusable" but really just from the same process, and you feel like a villain when discarding them! To their credit, I believe they still have a recycle bin, where you can bring them back. Now that I use delivery services most of the time, it's simply a one-way deluge. Often the bags are knotted and I just cut into them. Disposables are lower-quality, often with holes or defective handles, never fit for reuse. Yeah, I purchase custom trash bags, because they fit and they hold... garbage... correctly.
mdip 2y ago
I have some pretty strong feelings against government bans of these kinds but I had an experience at ALDI, yesterday, that caused me to reflect a little bit on this. Bear with me (if you wish) for a second ... I love ALDI -- mine even has the new "self-checkout" which I thought "was the end of ALDI" -- one of my previous reasons I loved the place was their checkers are ridiculously fast and "except for bagging your own crap", getting out the store is fast. But the line at the checkout was long so I did it myself. You bring your own bags or pay for theirs (with quality bags, most intended for long-term re-use, and I want to say they're $1 or $3, not $5 or $10 like is often the case for worse bags elsewhere but it's been a while). When I started regularly shopping there, I had forgotten mine, enough that I ended up buying a few and always went with the re-usable because they just weren't much more than their (otherwise fine/durable) disposables their large reusable ones seem massive[0]. It's been a while, but I never need more than 4, rarely more than 3 for a whole cart. Yesterday's trip changed something for me: In self-checkout the big space they give you to set your groceries is sized such that my old bags fit perfectly, all 3, on the tray. Every one of these miserable places is making me self-check, anyway, but they've got the most hassle-free setup (camera-based, doesn't complain every time you things shift -- no weight sensors). But the simplest things make all the difference: I could set three bags next to one another, opened flat ready to receive scanned groceries. Mix in ALDIs ridiculously large barcodes and I've got "Fridge", "Freezer" and "Other" and I'm grabbing an item, whipping it across the "scanner", getting a "ding" 100% of the time and tossing most of the groceries into the appropriate bag. It was the least hassle checking out of a store I've experienced to date and part of why it was so convenient was "the re-usable bags". You already have to bag your crap at ALDI (you can finagle getting your bags setup in the receiving cart when the checker starts but nobody remembers in the chaos of the ALDI check-out experience) and moving your full cart over to "the table", setting your bags and the like is far less convenient (the table, for one, is higher -- the self-checkout bagging area is easier to get bags in/out of). If every company executed on it like they do, I'd stop complaining about missing the "free plastic tissue things" that I don't know are appropriate to call "bags" any longer given how little they successfully carry. Especially since I could bring in an entire cart of groceries (with the bread and eggs resting gently on top) in three large bags with exactly zero concern that I'd be picking groceries up off of the lawn. As it stands, I can't believe I'll probably use ALDI self-checkout every trip despite my love for how well their checkers rip through a cart full of groceries. They introduce a handful of inconveniences but at a certain point, the problems they "solve with those inconveniences" end up making the experience better with them. For example, I can't think of a time I've gotten a busted up cart at an ALDI, or found an empty cart vestibule in an ALDI store that wasn't so packed I wouldn't want to go inside, anyway. The prices reflect the inconveniences generously enough that you don't spend as much time fussing over cost and just buy the things you want/need. So while I don't support government bans like this (nor do I support it specifically in this case), if most companies handled "the experience of bringing my crap home" as well as ALDI does, I'd find little reason to complain about it. [0] My daughter uses one to bring her mid-size (not small by any means) tower PC to and from our home weekly; same one for going on a year, now ... I check it every week when she packs it and the stitching looks great.
m463 2y ago
I have used fewer bags since these bans have gone into effect. I think people don't remember what life was like before these bans. I remember traveling from california to a state without a ban, and buying a few things at walmart. I came out with all my stuff in probably 10 plastic bags. It was convenient - only a few things per bag. I could carry 5 per hand and loaded everything into the car. But the bags were good for one thing - to throw in the trash. I also recall outside the store there were bags blowing across the parking lot in the wind. I also recall going to a state where there was no smoking ban in restaurants. I ate at a restaurant and went home. The next morning I could smell the stale cigarette smoke permeating my clothes from the previous day.
nojvek 2y ago
Banning is pretty dumb. I like the WA law of 8c per single use bag. High enough that it makes you think whether you need yet another bag. But low enough that if you need it, it’s there. I also love Aldi and Costco not having bags. Slight inconvenience but easy to workaround and then it becomes a habit.

37 points by geox 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

As I understand it, research done on communities that have banned plastic shopping bags found that overall plastic bag consumption didn't change appreciably. People were in the habit of reusing such bags as garbage bags and whatnot, and when they were banned, they bought other plastic bags to serve that purpose. My own experiences mirror this. Small sample size, but no one I know just throws away a plastic shopping bag after groceries are carried in; they always get reused.

ravenstine 2y ago
When plastic bags in CA began to get regulated last decade, I remember the reasoning being that the bags were floating away in the wind and getting into the environment. Conserving plastic wasn't the major motivator, but perhaps I'm misremembering.
- thghtihadanacct 2y ago
  Before the first ban went into effect I would see plastic bags caught in all the fencing, especially near the railroad. Now I see none and its beautiful. Im willing to let others be inconvenienced to see these gone.
  - dangsucksdick1 2y ago
    [dead]
  - animal_spirits 2y ago
    You're willing to make others pay more for food*
    - thghtihadanacct 2y ago
      id be more than willing to help them find reusable bags. Youre willing to litter the landscape with trash?
squigz 2y ago
I've acquired many, many reusable bags, and countless plastic bags. I also have normal garbage bags to use. At this point, I throw away most plastic bags I get. Otherwise I'd simply be inundated with plastic bags! Anyway I much prefer the reusable (fabric) bags. Much stronger, larger, easier to carry.
- NBJack 2y ago
  Do you have any advice on how to keep the fabric ones clean? I've been concerned about food contamination over time (i.e. raw meats that leak, etc.).
  - squigz 2y ago
    Hmmm... Good point that I should keep in mind in the future :D I would assume throwing at least some of them in the laundry would work well enough, or even just hand washing, but I guess that'll depend on the material itself.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
    You are already well-acquainted with machines that wash fabric.
    - squigz 2y ago
      Is the snark necessary?
      - misswest 2y ago
        Is this sanctimony?
      - dangsucksdick1 2y ago
        [dead]
      - vel0city 2y ago
        When people act like washing fabrics are some mystical and not well understood concept, sure. Or do most people also just wear single-use disposable clothing as well? Should we just assume people don't know how to do laundry?
AlwaysRock 2y ago
> State Sen. Catherine Blakespear, one of the bill’s supporters, said people were not reusing or recycling any plastic bags. She pointed to a state study that found that the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed per person grew from 8 pounds (3.6 kilograms) per year in 2004 to 11 pounds (5 kilograms) per year in 2021. It looks like lots of people did toss plastic bags, even the thicker ones, away after one use. I wasnt living in CA but the thicker plastic bags were just thicker disposable bags to many people.
- jchmbrln 2y ago
  I wonder how much of that growth is because the bags themselves are so much thicker/heavier now. It would be interesting to compare count vs. weight. It looks like the new, thick bags are 5x thicker than the old, thin ones (0.5 mils vs 2.5 mils) [0]. 11lb is a lot less than 5x 8lb, so the per-person bag trashing must be drastically lowered, unless weight and thickness aren’t correlated. [0] https://1bagatatime.com/learn/what-is-a-mill/ https://1bagatatime.com/learn/what-is-a-mill/
jchmbrln 2y ago
This was my first thought on seeing the title as well. My entire life I and every family member I can think of has used plastic grocery bags for our little bathroom trash cans. I don’t even know what the options are for “real” bags of that size, having never shopped for them. Time to learn, I guess. That said, this could still reduce my plastic use. The old, thin bags were sufficient. The new, thick bags have been overkill since day one. Given that the frequency with which I take out the trash didn’t change when the thin bags were banned, I’m sure I use quite a bit more plastic than before the ban. Maybe bags sold for small trash cans are thinner, and I’ll go back to pre-ban levels of use.
zbrozek 2y ago
Yeah, I stopped getting to reuse plastic grocery bags as wastebasket liners and started buying dedicated liners. And even in the old days when the disposable plastic bags were still available here, I would bring back any bags I wasn't using as wastebasket liners and reuse them until they broke. IIRC, the stated purpose at the time was to reduce plastic bags blowing in the wind. But I didn't see a lot of that before the rules, nor do I see much of it in US places that don't have sun a ban. It seems more correlated to general cultural tidiness than to rules around bags. Japan loves plastic bags and I basically don't see any litter anywhere there. But I did see a lot of them out in the environment in Cambodia and Vietnam.
scoofy 2y ago
The point isn't to reduce plastic use. It's to reduce the amount of plastics that end up in our waterways and the ocean. If everyone was reusing their plastic bags as waste bags... even if people who used plastic bags just threw them away, this wouldn't be an issue at all. The point of this is people don't throw them away, and they tend to end up as litter that ends up in storm drains or in Coastal California, just blow into the ocean. It makes perfectly good sense to want to ban plastic grocery bags in coastal states and keep them in inland states.

scohesc 2y ago

I would always store/re-use the thin plastic grocery bags for trashbins, storage bags for miscellaneous things/junk, etc. etc. Yeah, we probably collected too many over time, and then got fed up and shoved the mass of plastic bags from the drawer into the garbage and into the landfills. The new plastic ones, I always forget to bring, end up buying 2-3 new ones for $1.25 each - which I'm sure the store has a decent margin on - and then they sit in the house - too "nice" to be used for garbage or any other purposes, so they sit there and eventually get thrown out. And then you have the previous generation, who moved from paper to plastic to save the environment - whether that was a lobbying campaign from "big oil" to use more plastic, or a well intentioned grassroots movement that grew to make big change. So now we're back to paper. I wonder if I'll live long enough for a new revolutionary material to come to market and we quickly move to replace the current material. (hemp fiber bags maybe?)

AlwaysRock 2y ago
We started leaving a handful of reusable bags in the car which made it easier to remember to reuse them. It was harder to remember when we walked to the grocery store.
- skybrian 2y ago
  In the winter when I was visiting New York, I would try to always have a couple of bags in my coat.

bko 2y ago

I've written about this before as my home state of NJ enforced a similar ban a little while ago. In our case, they banned paper bags as well! It all points to a larger question: who is writing these laws?? It's such an anti-human law. It makes your life considerably worse off in a noticeable way. And it doesn't actually reduce waste, but makes things worse. Here is a few things that happened: - Reusable bags have to be reused dozens of times to make up for the additional environmental impact, so damage likely went up - People have to pay more to buy more expensive plastic bags to carry their goods that are ironically also wrapped in plastic. - Whole Foods home delivery had to send you more sturdy and expensive "reusable" bags. Just what the typical Whole Foods home delivery patron needs, about a dozen reusable bags delivered to them every week - People started stealing hand held shopping baskets It really doesn't bode well for the political process that politicians can force these ham fisted reactionary laws at a considerably cost to nearly all denizens for absolutely no purpose. https://mleverything.substack.com/p/new-jersey-bans-paper-bags https://mleverything.substack.com/p/new-jersey-bans-paper-ba... https://mleverything.substack.com/p/an-update-on-new-jerseys-paper-bag https://mleverything.substack.com/p/an-update-on-new-jerseys...

lotsofpulp 2y ago
Banning across the board is stupid. In Washington state, you can buy plastic bags for $0.08. Enough to incentivize most people to bring their own bag, not enough to cause adverse consequences because a bag is only $0.08 in the event you don’t bring a bag.
- ssl-3 2y ago
  Who decides that a bag is worth $0.08, and where does that $0.08 go when a bag is purchased?
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    The cost of the bag has to be $0.08 plus sales tax at minimum. https://ecology.wa.gov/waste-toxics/reducing-recycling-waste/plastics/plastic-bag-ban https://ecology.wa.gov/waste-toxics/reducing-recycling-waste... > Where does the 8-cent fee on paper and reusable bags go? >Businesses collect and keep the entire 8 cents to recover some of the cost of providing the bags and to incentivize customers to bring their own reusable bags. The charge must be shown as a taxable sale on the receipt provided to the customer. Businesses may choose to charge more than 8 cents per bag. My above comment is technically incorrect because there is an across the board ban on thin, single use plastic bags. But it’s not super inconvenient or costly to have to pay $0.08 (the only price for bags I have ever seen). However, that price might go up in the future because the regulations call for even thicker bags in Jan 2026, which I did not know. > In January 2026, the minimum thickness requirement will increase from 2.25 mil to 4 mil.

chollida1 2y ago

Ontario has had this law for a while now. Its occasionally inconvenient when you drop by the grocery store unplanned and have no bags, but is really a big nothing burger. Just means we end up with more and more useless shopping bags at our front door, which almost seems worse than single use ones that end up becoming garbage bags for the kitchen. Now we end up buying single use plastic bags for our kitchen and bathroom garbage and end up with more and more reusable plastic bags. So the single use plastic bags still get used at the same rate, just now I purchase them separately for garbage and we end up with more and more reusable plastic bags, which I'm guessing are worse for the environment. These laws so far don't seem to be very well thought out.

rurp 2y ago

I am basically the core demographic that this sort of law should appeal to. I try to always bring reusable bags to the store, even though I live in a not-very-green city where half of the cashiers look surprised and confused by such a thing. In general I wish that we were doing far more to conserve the environment. But I think that this is a dumb law. The problem is that the benefit:annoyance ratio is terrible. Plastic bags are bad for environment and using fewer is better, but the benefits of a blanket ban will be very modest and the annoyance to everyday people is significant. The unpleasant reality is that political capital is a big factor in getting things done in a democracy, and people should be mindful of how it's spent. Most voters are indifferent or mildly in favor of protecting the environment; they will go along with environmental goals as long as they don't perceive them as harming their quality of life too much. And that's fine. This means that highly visible and inconvenient policies that tinker around the edges are the opposite of what environmentalists should be aiming for. Unfortunately politicians often aren't trying to fix a problem, they want to appear to be fixing a problem, which is how we end up with performative legislation. Which then wraps the issue up in the usual culture war nonsense, opponents dig in, and more meaningful policies get blocked.

scoofy 2y ago
Ehh... I have to push back here. Any annoyance ratio is one that collapses for the next generation. Ask any child about whether we should allow plastic bags that pollute our water tables and oceans or paper bags that don't, and pretty much every kid will say paper. It's the obvious choice if you're not habituated to plastic. There are lots and lots of types of inexpensive bags we could use that don't actively fuck up our waterways. Plastic bag advocates just like to pretend those don't exist because it's expedient. The same thing happened when we phased out styrofoam.
- autoexec 2y ago
  > Ask any child about whether we should allow plastic bags that pollute our water tables and oceans or paper bags that don't, and pretty much every kid will say paper. I suspect that'll have a lot to do with the fact that children don't go grocery shopping, and don't have to carry a bunch of items from cars, up stairs, and into their homes. They also don't give even a passing thought to the plastic bags being regularly re-used as bin liners in the home, or re-used to pick up after their dogs while on walks, or re-used for transporting items to other people's houses. Paper bags are not a reasonable alternative to plastic bags for heavy loads, wet/soiled things, times when you need to carry more than one (or maybe two) bags at a time, etc. Is it possible to manufacture an alternative bag that accomplishes all of the things that plastic bags do today? Maybe. Is such as bag widely available for the same cost? Nope. If plastic bag ban advocates want everyone onboard they'd do better to make sure that viable alternatives which are, at a minimum, at least as good as plastic bags are ready to fill in the void. Until that's the case it's going to be a massive pain to just ban what works. If plastic shopping bags were "banned" where I live, I'd just find myself needing to pay for plastic shopping bags which used to be free because I still don't have anything to replace their utility for many tasks. That'd mean that I'm producing the same amount of plastic waste as before, only now I'd be paying more and be inconvenienced in the process. Even when it comes to shopping bags used purely for shopping, many of the reusable canvas bags I've seen at stores don't hold as many items as plastic bags do, don't have handles that are as long/useful, and inconvenience me by requiring me to always have them with me and to know, in advance, how many I'm going to end up needing on every trip to the store. If you want to get people to give something up, you can spend a ton of energy and time beating the public into compliance with sticks and shaming them until they begrudgingly give up something they want, or you can just offer them something better in which case all the work is done for you. The transition from styrofoam to plastic accomplished that. No one has offered up something better.

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greenavocado 2y ago

Ocean plastic waste is terrible and a good proxy for cultural attitudes to discarding plastics in general and the United States is in the absolute minority of regions in the world regarding plastic pollution. South East Asia is indisputably the main problem when it comes to harmful practices around plastic waste disposal. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/161rmp9/the_sources_of_oceans_plastic_pollution/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/161rmp9/the_source... https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic-waste-pollution-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

JohnMakin 2y ago

This was a very predictable result, correctly predicted by climate activists 10 years ago that were shouted down by the grocer lobbies and the faux greenwashing climate "activists" that accused them of stopping "progress". It was so easy to see: - meaningless 5 cent bag surcharge that no one would notice other than the initial outrage, and not enough to fund anything meaningful about plastic waste removal at scale - much heavier plastic bags - no incentive for consumer behavior to change Like, what else did they expect other than plastic waste to increase?

matteoraso 2y ago

Given how HN always freaks out about microplastics, I'm surprised that people feel like this is a bad law. Personally, I want a Rwanda-style ban on plastic.

snakeyjake 2y ago

Several counties in Maryland (the non "yee-haw" ones that border the Chesapeake) have banned plastic bags. Styrofoam has been banned statewide for several years. The amount of plastic and expanded polystyrene foam trash I pull out of the water and off the shore on Bay Cleanup days has fallen so drastically that it is almost unbelievable. What hasn't fallen is the sky. Or our freedom. Or the ability to clean out litter boxes. I'm a watershed steward and meetings and networking events I have found that my experience has been shared with almost every other steward I've talked to. Even those who look after waterways outside of the bag ban area have benefitted because most of the population lies within a bag ban area. If single-use plastic bottles were banned there would be practically no plastic debris in the Bay.

vel0city 2y ago
Its incredible how much trash in our waterways are single-use water bottles and plastic bags. It was one thing I really noticed when I visited Quebec recently. There was practically none of the plastic bag trash stuck all over every twig around the creeks and rivers like what I see in most other places.

radicality 2y ago

I’m in NYC where we similarly have dumb anti-plastic laws that are more political than actually for the environment. Oh the straws are paper now? All right, I’m gonna take 5 then because I’ll need to swap it out around every 5 min. At the grocery store? Everything needs to be double or triple bagged so it doesn’t fall apart. Are that many paper bags (trees) even encmvironmentaly friendly? NYC is a walking city, and I vividly remember someone once walking with a paper grocery bag, and then everything falling out onto the sidewalk as the bag broke during a light drizzle.

zug_zug 2y ago
5 paper straws is probably better for the environment than one plastic straw.
- klyrs 2y ago
  Bzzt, they're coated in PFAS; they might be worse.
- ProllyInfamous 2y ago
  I love when I saw my first paper straw: wrapped in plastic.
com2kid 2y ago
Bamboo straws are awesome. Most places around me just stopped using straws. Only kids drinks and boba get straws now days.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

I suppose the legislation around here has gone through a couple iterations, but I don't really know. Decades ago I would make grocery runs on the bus, just carry an empty backpack and perhaps another bag, stuff them tightly full, and any overflow was in disposable bags. Only as much as I could carry. I also received weird looks and attitudes at certain stores when I'd check out with a duffel bag on the conveyor belt. The checker would grimace and exhibit disdain and a reluctance to even touch the filthy thing? Gee, sorry. It often resulted in "pack my own goods" rather than a bagger willing to do it for me. My appreciation for expert, efficient baggers has grown immensely. I started picking up reusable totes where I shopped. They're all branded! So I'd feel weird being disloyal and packing the "wrong" tote at a different store. Shame led me to purchase a variety of totes everywhere I shopped... overkill! And, as others have mentioned, I often shop on a whim and unprepared, so those fancy bags all get left at home, 80% of the time, and I come home with more disposables. The disposables can really add up. You may find yourself hoarding if you think that you can reuse them. I clamped a limit on bag storage, and gleefully discard excess ones. I took note when my farmer's market switched from disposables, to slightly thicker plastic touted as "reusable" but really just from the same process, and you feel like a villain when discarding them! To their credit, I believe they still have a recycle bin, where you can bring them back. Now that I use delivery services most of the time, it's simply a one-way deluge. Often the bags are knotted and I just cut into them. Disposables are lower-quality, often with holes or defective handles, never fit for reuse. Yeah, I purchase custom trash bags, because they fit and they hold... garbage... correctly.

mdip 2y ago

I have some pretty strong feelings against government bans of these kinds but I had an experience at ALDI, yesterday, that caused me to reflect a little bit on this. Bear with me (if you wish) for a second ... I love ALDI -- mine even has the new "self-checkout" which I thought "was the end of ALDI" -- one of my previous reasons I loved the place was their checkers are ridiculously fast and "except for bagging your own crap", getting out the store is fast. But the line at the checkout was long so I did it myself. You bring your own bags or pay for theirs (with quality bags, most intended for long-term re-use, and I want to say they're $1 or $3, not $5 or $10 like is often the case for worse bags elsewhere but it's been a while). When I started regularly shopping there, I had forgotten mine, enough that I ended up buying a few and always went with the re-usable because they just weren't much more than their (otherwise fine/durable) disposables their large reusable ones seem massive[0]. It's been a while, but I never need more than 4, rarely more than 3 for a whole cart. Yesterday's trip changed something for me: In self-checkout the big space they give you to set your groceries is sized such that my old bags fit perfectly, all 3, on the tray. Every one of these miserable places is making me self-check, anyway, but they've got the most hassle-free setup (camera-based, doesn't complain every time you things shift -- no weight sensors). But the simplest things make all the difference: I could set three bags next to one another, opened flat ready to receive scanned groceries. Mix in ALDIs ridiculously large barcodes and I've got "Fridge", "Freezer" and "Other" and I'm grabbing an item, whipping it across the "scanner", getting a "ding" 100% of the time and tossing most of the groceries into the appropriate bag. It was the least hassle checking out of a store I've experienced to date and part of why it was so convenient was "the re-usable bags". You already have to bag your crap at ALDI (you can finagle getting your bags setup in the receiving cart when the checker starts but nobody remembers in the chaos of the ALDI check-out experience) and moving your full cart over to "the table", setting your bags and the like is far less convenient (the table, for one, is higher -- the self-checkout bagging area is easier to get bags in/out of). If every company executed on it like they do, I'd stop complaining about missing the "free plastic tissue things" that I don't know are appropriate to call "bags" any longer given how little they successfully carry. Especially since I could bring in an entire cart of groceries (with the bread and eggs resting gently on top) in three large bags with exactly zero concern that I'd be picking groceries up off of the lawn. As it stands, I can't believe I'll probably use ALDI self-checkout every trip despite my love for how well their checkers rip through a cart full of groceries. They introduce a handful of inconveniences but at a certain point, the problems they "solve with those inconveniences" end up making the experience better with them. For example, I can't think of a time I've gotten a busted up cart at an ALDI, or found an empty cart vestibule in an ALDI store that wasn't so packed I wouldn't want to go inside, anyway. The prices reflect the inconveniences generously enough that you don't spend as much time fussing over cost and just buy the things you want/need. So while I don't support government bans like this (nor do I support it specifically in this case), if most companies handled "the experience of bringing my crap home" as well as ALDI does, I'd find little reason to complain about it. [0] My daughter uses one to bring her mid-size (not small by any means) tower PC to and from our home weekly; same one for going on a year, now ... I check it every week when she packs it and the stitching looks great.

m463 2y ago

I have used fewer bags since these bans have gone into effect. I think people don't remember what life was like before these bans. I remember traveling from california to a state without a ban, and buying a few things at walmart. I came out with all my stuff in probably 10 plastic bags. It was convenient - only a few things per bag. I could carry 5 per hand and loaded everything into the car. But the bags were good for one thing - to throw in the trash. I also recall outside the store there were bags blowing across the parking lot in the wind. I also recall going to a state where there was no smoking ban in restaurants. I ate at a restaurant and went home. The next morning I could smell the stale cigarette smoke permeating my clothes from the previous day.

nojvek 2y ago

Banning is pretty dumb. I like the WA law of 8c per single use bag. High enough that it makes you think whether you need yet another bag. But low enough that if you need it, it’s there. I also love Aldi and Costco not having bags. Slight inconvenience but easy to workaround and then it becomes a habit.