California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-02-12/californias-war-on-plastic-bag-use-seems-to-have-backfired

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

30 84 2 years ago

latimes.com

grugagag• 2 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240219042015/https://www.latim...

misja111• 2 years ago

This still gives me a paywall

spicybbq• 2 years ago

https://archive.ph/5TH1O

OsrsNeedsf2P• 2 years ago

The problem, it turns out, was a section of the law that allowed grocery stores and large retailers to provide thicker, heavier-weight plastic bags to customers for the price of a dime.

cptskippy2• 2 years ago

I love that half the people here didn't bother to read the article to understand that key point. The easy fix is just to swap out the HDPE bags for LDPE keeping everything else the same.

However there's a degree of dishonesty or perhaps naïveté with the rationale behind the law. It assumes people will always act in good faith. There will always be a legitimate exception to compliance. Exceptions will be accommodated because of the assumption of good faith. Some people always choose to be bad actors because they know there will be accommodations made.

The supermarket itself is full of examples:

1 - Handicap spots are meant to support people with mobility issues. In practice they don't differentiate between mobility issues and other handicaps, so anyone with a sticker/plate uses the spots regardless. Growing up, my friend's family use to take grandma's car to the store because she had handicap plates and they could park up front. Spirit of the law be damned, it's about complying with the letter.

2 - Shopping carts are provided free for use while shopping, the store just asks that you return them to the cart corral when you're done. There's no accountability and lots of people do not return the carts to corrals, people leave them full of garbage and dirty diapers, and people steal them.

TexanFeller3• 2 years ago

Bag bans are one of the most perfect examples of how American environmentalists focus on all the wrong things and miss the forrest for the trees. The plastic bag in the grocery store contains multiple products packaged in 100x more volume of plastic than the plastic bag. It also contains a bunch of single serving aluminum cans. Banning plastic bags moves the needle the least and greatly annoys customers. It would be far better to promote banning of single serving aluminum cans for drinks and plastic/styrofoam packaging for goods within the store.

milliams3• 2 years ago

This is where fun protests like https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-43559636 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWz_p445Oh0 help. I've noticed a more concerted effort by supermarkets to reduce plastic in their packaging (it's still a lot though) and to provide "soft plastic" recycling (at their expense).

thimp3• 2 years ago

I had a girlfriend who unpackaged a lot of stuff she bought at the checkout so she wouldn't have to deal with the trash. I thought it was insane for a bit but no it's quite reasonable actually when you think about it.

AdamN2• 2 years ago

Environmentalists can also focus on environmental beauty - which is the primary rationale for reducing single-use plastic bags so they don't end up in trees and on the street. This is more of a hedonistic environmentalism but it's totally valid. We can also push for other big ticket items like better sewage control and highway runoff management at the same time.

gruez6• 2 years ago

which is the primary rationale for reducing single-use plastic bags so they don't end up in trees and on the street.

Except that wasn't really an issue before the ban. Sure, I noticed a few bags laying on the street sometimes, but it's not like the streets were clogged with them[1]. In the same vein, I guess banning plastic straws does cause a non-zero amount of plastic straws from entering the environment, but it's not like it was a serious issue that warranted government intervention.

This is more of a hedonistic environmentalism but it's totally valid

I agree with this statement, but probably not in the way you originally intended: it's a feel-good measure to make people think they're helping the environment.

[1] eg. https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/955ff575a1da022b144dfffd34d0f...

acover• 2 years ago

Aluminum cans contain about 73% recycled aluminum, in case anyone else was curious. I'm not sure why I thought it was 95%+

https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/aluminum-cans-recycled-t...

bhickey• 2 years ago

I'm not sure why I thought it was 95%+

You may have been remembering numbers for the aluminum recycling rate in goods like cars.

On average, about 97% of the aluminum content in an end-of-life vehicle is recycled. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2022/whats-holding-back-alu...

raisedbyninjas• 2 years ago

If plastic bag bans annoy customers, wait until you ask people to wash and refill their single-use aluminum cans. Reusable bags are actually a pleasure to carry items and a minor inconvenience to schlep to the store.

xnorswap2• 2 years ago

Your argument is a popular contrarian take, but it doesn't seem to hold up to the evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/governme...

If California has a problem it isn't because bag bans don't work, it's because they've screwed up their implementation.

And yes, supermarkets do still use a lot of unnecessary plastic in packaging, but that's another issue that can also be tackled, and I haven't seen evidence that it has actually got worse since the plastic bag levy.

Arguing that plastic bags shouldn't be tackled because something else could be done is an argument to do nothing.

Plastic carrier bags were an absolute scourge a decade ago, they were everywhere. Their use has been absolutely decimated.

The arguments that people are secretly using more because they're no longer re-using them as bin bags or because they're buying "bags for life" instead are bad faith arguments that just don't hold up to the statistics or the reality of the situation.

Over 7 billion less plastic bags produced per year in the UK. That's a tremendous achievement.

gruez6• 2 years ago

The OP was talking about "bag bans". Your linked article talks about a "bag charge". Those are totally different things. Bag bans force forgetful people to buy "reusable" bags that take more plastic to produce, and inevitably pile up an need to be disposed of. Bag charges don't have that issue, because you can continue to buy thin bags, just at a steep markup.

lozenge• 2 years ago

That's a very selective statistic from a government department.

How many "reusable" bags are sold every year? Each one weighs 50-100x more than the old bags and I guarantee they aren't used proportionally more times.

The statistic given doesn't even cover most businesses. It only covers the major supermarkets - who only offer single use bags in online deliveries and make everybody else buy a much more expensive reusable bag. Pretty much every small business still offers a 10p bag.

cal853• 2 years ago

Arguing that plastic bags shouldn't be tackled because something else could be done is an argument to do nothing.

How does that follow?

JoeAltmaier• 2 years ago

Any cherry-picked stat can look good. What replaced those 7B? Cloth? Paper? Exercise for the environmentalist: which has a larger impact on the planet? Compare and contrast.

Nothing is wholly a win here. Just by existing we impact the planet. Seriously, the principle effective way to reduce environmental impact is to have 7 billion fewer people on the planet. Anything else can be seen as theatre.

stetrain2• 2 years ago

Are single serving aluminum cans, if recycled, really worse than the alternatives? Plastic bottles or glass both have their own emissions and recycling issues.

Ekaros• 2 years ago

Aluminium cans are probably one of the most effective packing tools we have. They are light, they are volumetrically efficient compared to let's say bottles. They can be recycled effectively. Also they keep stuff good longer than plastic.

Glass on other hand is heavy, and washing it to food standard requires surprisingly hot water and caustic chemicals. Plus all the care in the handling and extra tooling in handling the bottles.

TexanFeller3• 2 years ago

They’re far worse than the alternative of using reusable containers. Single serving containers should be replaced with reusable containers filled from fountains in public places or from concentrate in something like a sodastream. Coca Coka would prefer we talk about the benefits of recycling so it doesn’t affect their business practices.

martycon4• 2 years ago

All waste has issues. Time reduce, reuse, recycle. Products should be sold in containers that can be used again as much as possible.

audunw• 2 years ago

It would be far better to promote banning of single serving aluminum cans

Uh, what? Aluminum cans are actually one of the things that can be easily recycled, and it's economic too. If anything should be done it is to mandate the introduction of bottle/can recycling machines like "Tomra" in the US.

and plastic/styrofoam packaging for goods within the store.

That plastic packaging does actually serve a purpose which is not easy to solve in other ways though. People think plastic wrapped vegetables is stupid, but it helps keep the vegetables fresh for longer, which reduces waste.

There are organic compostable "plastic" films that should eventually be used instead. But it's work in progress.

Meanwhile, replacing a single use grocery bag for a reusable one is something that can be done instantly today.

belorn3• 2 years ago

With the goal of less plastic in the ocean and landfills, the solution should not be to make a very narrow and specific form of plastic illegal while everything else is acceptable. Thick plastic and aluminum are both terrible at decomposing at the bottom of the ocean. Natural fibers however tend to dissolve quite well in water.

Recycling and plastic waste initiatives seems like two completely different goals. Recycling reduce energy usage in the industry, but the effect on ocean waste can be anything from beneficial, marginal to negative. In order to address single serving aluminum cans, one of the more effective solution is container-deposit. When 1/5 of the counter price is in the deposit, people seems to litter a lot less. It need to hurt a little to throw the can into the ocean or just randomly in the street.

bryanlarsen• 2 years ago

But thick plastic and aluminum are much less likely to end up in an ocean than a plastic disposable grocery bag. Plastic disposable grocery bags catch the wind very easily and are great kites. They can easily travel hundreds of miles in the air.

Also, decomposing in the ocean is exactly what we don't want. Plastic disposable grocery bags decompose into microplastics, and we're finding out how bad that is. A heavier bag stays intact.

stetrain2• 2 years ago

I have never had trouble recycling aluminum cans when I live in a place with curbside recycling or in public with clearly marked recycling containers. Nobody even had to pay me to do it. I know littering will happen and deposits can help with that, but it also seems like the percentage of cans that get littered vs recycling would be small in a place with convenient recycling.

I know that some will end up in landfills and oceans, but is aluminum in the ocean an ecological problem in the way plastics are?

One of the big issues with the thin plastic film shopping bags is that they aren't easily recyclable at home or in public. Recently I have seen grocery stores near me offer such recycling as a service, but home recycling pickup doesn't accept them.

milliams3• 2 years ago

In the UK we brought in a similar law and the shops were allowed to charge (if I remember correctly) 5p for the thin bags that were previously used or 10p for a stronger one. It wasn't long before they mostly phased out the thin bags and started raising the cost of the stronger bags, I think they're maybe around 50p now. They've also mostly moved back to bag-less delivery (if you get delivery). Anecdotally looking around the shop when I visit, most people are using the much stronger "bag for life" bags which costs (again I'm half guessing) a few pounds and are reused from one shopping trip to the next.

thimp3• 2 years ago

Yeah that's about it. They slowly made them prohibitively more expensive. I've actually had the same shopping bag for 27 years and have gone from being seen as a hippy weirdo to never being questioned. It was just normalised that you got bags free before. That should have never been the case in the first place!

lurking153• 2 years ago

and have gone from being seen as a hippy weirdo to never being questioned

you're still a hippy weirdo

mukundmr• 2 years ago

It is better for shops to just sell jute or cloth bags at retail price for carrying goods instead of allowing users to buy any type of plastic bag. This is how it is done in India in places where plastic is banned. Of course, customers can bring their own carry bags and avoid buying bags.

gkbrk• 2 years ago

If I remember correctly, Tesco will even replace your "bag for life" if it's broken. Or at least they did for a while.

dawnerd• 2 years ago

Oregon did similar. Before their law almost everyone in the Portland metro used nice easy to curbside recycle paper bags. Then they all switched to plastic. If you’re going to force recycling make it easy. Those plastic bags are not and still can’t be curb side recycled and will end up in the landfill as that study found.

AdamN2• 2 years ago

Plastic bags are far cheaper and even if they are not really recyclable, they have less of an upstream impact on the environment (a few grams of oil from underground vs a percentage of a tree farm that disrupts an ecosystem).

In the end reusable bags or boxes are the only sustainable solution regardless.

bdw5204• 2 years ago

Thick plastic bags are “not what consumers demanded when they overwhelmingly voted to support California’s bag ban at the ballot box when the policy was challenged,” Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) told reporters recently in reference to Proposition 67, a 2016 ballot measure that would have negated the 2014 law.

The word "overwhelmingly" apparently means 53.27%[0] in a state that is an outlier politically compared to the rest of the country (the 2016 presidential election there was 61.73% to 31.62%). It's fascinating to me how little effort there has been on the east coast to oppose and overturn these kinds of laws, probably because the political faction that would be expected to oppose them loves passing off videos of people leaving stores without bags as shoplifting videos to play into the "blue cities and states are legalizing shoplifting" narrative.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_California_Proposition_67

dachworker• 2 years ago

I remember the brown paper bag being an iconic part of American movies, when I was growing up. What happened to that?

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

I worked for a supermarket in the late 1980s and we were always trying to give people as few bags as possible because... the bags cost money and come out of our profits.

We used to get a lot of requests for what we called a "Boston Bag" (this was New Hampshire) which was a large paper bag inside two plastic bags. The claim was that people who had to go up the stairs in apartments in Boston demanded this sort of bag.

dionidium• 2 years ago

I can carry one of those in each arm or maybe three total bags, if I balance it right. With the plastic ones I can get just about the whole trunk-load wrapped around my wrists and up the stairs in one go.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Don't your plastic bags have handles in the US?

CuriouslyC• 2 years ago

Seriously, when I was a young man in college I would ride back from the grocery store on my bike with about 50 pounds of groceries in double bagged plastic balanced on my handlebars. Life with only paper bags would have been very sad.

jfengel2• 2 years ago

Here in Maryland they have returned. We got rid of the plastic bags and they brought in paper. I think grocery stores are required to charge ten cents.

(Not fast food restaurants, though some entrepreneurial or confused franchise managers did try for a while.)

mminer237• 2 years ago

They take much more energy/water/land to make, making them much more expensive. Traditionally they didn't have handles and weren't as strong as plastic either. Plastic bags are much better for the store and consumer, ignoring any externalities.

Ferret7446• 2 years ago

We replaced them with plastic to be more environmentally friendly, as making paper requires a lot of resources/water not to mention cutting down trees.

Yes, we just keep repeating history.

flaminHotSpeedo7• 2 years ago

This doesn't pass the sniff test for me... The article claims that plastic bag waste went from 4.08 tons to 5.89 tons per 1000 people from 2014 to 2022, then attributes that to the new heavier bags.

I don't have good numbers but as a terrible estimate let's say an old single use bag was 5 grams and a newer one is 30 grams.

If plastic bag weight really went up almost 50% per capita, using that assumption that an individual bag (which can now hold more since it's sturdier and doesn't need to be double-bagged, but we'll ignore that for the sake of estimation) increased in weight by a factor of 6, that means (unless I've done my math, if you use the term loosely, wrong) roughly one in five people never re-uses grocery bags.

Considering that a lot of people would be inconsistent about remembering reusable bags, you'd expect to see more than one in five people using the store provided bags on any given trip to the grocery store, and that doesn't align with my anecdotal observations whatsoever

cfn2• 2 years ago

We introduced similar laws here in Portugal last year and my anedoctal observation is that most people buy the thicker bags at 10-20 cents. It is also very obvious that many items that used to be sold loose are now packaged or bring their own plastic or paper bag. I'm looking forward to the statistics next year.

EDIT: It is not clear above, I mean that most people don't reuse the bags, they just buy new ones each time.

flaminHotSpeedo7• 2 years ago

Out of curiosity, would you consider the grocery stores you visit to be relatively representative of the country overall?

That was the biggest flaw with my line of reasoning, I'm not sure how representative my grocery store experience is, though I'm basing it off of visits to grocery stores across multiple states and varying levels of affluence

gruez6• 2 years ago

I don't have good numbers but as a terrible estimate let's say an old single use bag was 5 grams and a newer one is 30 grams.

So, a factor of 6? Try a factor of 40[1] instead.

[1] 0.5 mil vs 20 mil https://1bagatatime.com/learn/what-is-a-mill/

flaminHotSpeedo7• 2 years ago

You didn't read your own source, that website your linked cited 2.5 mil. I guess I was off by a factor of 1

cal853• 2 years ago

I almost always have to buy bags. I tend to pick up groceries on a whim while already out and about so I don’t have bags with me. And even when I go out specifically for groceries, I usually forget to bring bags. I consider it a tax for being a disorganised and forgetful person. The idea that 1/5 people are like me doesn’t surprise me at all.

Also apparently 30g is the low end for the thicker bags - this site says they weigh 30-120g:

https://weightofallthings.com/how-much-does-a-plastic-bag-we...

flaminHotSpeedo7• 2 years ago

Based on a bit of extra research 30g is pretty middle of the road for the bags in question. 120g is for actually reusable bags, what folks are calling "bag for life"

cptskippy2• 2 years ago

that doesn't align with my anecdotal observations whatsoever

Are you factoring in all of the people you don't see? What about everyone who picks up groceries or has them delivered? 100% of those transactions use the "reusable" bags.

You even provide an example of how your reasoning fails:

...which can now hold more since it's sturdier ...

Just because something can hold more, doesn't mean it will. Someone who needs a disposable bag to hold 3 items they just bought now has to use the heavier duty bag.

People don't want to over-pack bags because certain items will be crushed or damaged. They tend to under pack or individually pack certain items. Those people are now using heavy duty reusable bags for a task that the old light weight bags would have sufficed.

martycon4• 2 years ago

Plastic bag use went up in California because of covid. Some moron said reusable bags spread covid germs. So stores banned reusable bags for many years. It's just back to normal where reusable bags are acceptable to bring in by the customer.

jeffbee• 2 years ago

In my city I think they outlawed plastic bags altogether. I haven't seen one in ages. The grocery markets will give you a paper one for a dime but many people use their canvas or insulated shoulder bags. They're sort of a fashion statement. You're not really from Berkeley unless you carry your produce home in a bag with the logo of some place that closed in the 1990s.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Funny, I stopped getting free or paid plastic bags before it was un-cool and un-eco, just because I was tired of throwing away a plastic bag full of plastic bags regularly. I just keep 2-3 around and reuse them now.

Perhaps we're just going with the wrong incentives.

jrochkind1• 2 years ago

Where I live in Baltimore, Maryland, we have a much more recent single-use plastic bag ban which is very similar -- and I think has the same loophole, with even the same 10 cent charge. I remember reading about it when the law was being rolled out, a few years ago.

But I haven't actually seen any establishment at all offer those heavier allowed-for-a-surcharge bag, it doesn't seem to have become the same problem.

I wonder what the difference is.

Disposalbe paper bags for 5 cents a bag are also allowed, and definitely highly used.

silent_cal• 2 years ago

I visited Alaska a few years ago and they had a similar policy. You could get paper bags, but you had to pay for them. No plastic bags. And I did notice that there weren't plastic bags all over the place, so it seemed to be a great idea to me. Granted, I don't have a before/after to make a real comparison.

demondemidi• 2 years ago

I know it’s fun and easy to dunk on progressive states. But at least they are trying and not just throwing up their hands and going “oh well”. Now maybe they have C-students writing policy but I think “backfire” compared to the situation before is needlessly inflammatory. And I say that as an amateur internet troll.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

California bill would ban all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39322169

California Tried to Ban Plastic Grocery Bags

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/climate/california-plasti...

crabbone• 2 years ago

Moving from Israel to the Netherlands, it was one of the things I had to get used to. Israeli groceries offer free plastic bags for many things. In the Netherlands most supermarket chains have none (only the heavier durable kinds).

However: produce (i.e. cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes etc.) in Israel are not individually packaged. Usually, I'd take one bag and stuff it with different vegetables / fruits. It's somewhat messy at the checkout, but if you aren't buying a lot, it's fine. In the Netherlands it's very common to package either individual fruits / vegetables (esp. cucumbers for some reason!) or small multiples (eg. apples are sold in four-packs, as are pears, kiwis etc.)

So, in the end of the day, the amount of plastic I bring back home from a grocery store is greater in the Netherlands than what it was in Israel.

----

But, if I go all the way back to my childhood... It's perfectly possible to do grocery shopping without any plastic packaging whatsoever. A lot of things we buy from the grocery today were things that some 30 years ago just were supposed to be made at home. A lot of ready-made food simply didn't exist, but today it could be the number one source of plastic packaging. Things like yogurt cups or various similar snacks, sandwiches, salads, anything packaged for a single serving.

I can sort of see how some people simply might not have the time to deal with cooking or even just sorting the groceries. The pace of life definitely changed towards dedicating less time to such boring tasks. But, there are still people like myself who wouldn't mind spending extra half an hour in a grocery store / bring their own containers for various goods. It's just nobody sells food in this fashion anymore.

eappleby• 2 years ago

Would this problem be solved if there were bins in front of supermarkets where people could drop off their extra bags and other people could grab them if they needed them? I get that the stores may not like it because they sell the bags, but if they were onboard, would there be any reason why it wouldn't work?

California's war on plastic bag use seems to have backfired

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