California law bans all plastic shopping bags at grocery stores
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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-ba...
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/an-update-on-new-jerseys...
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.
One of the nice things about the older "non-reusable" bags was that they were so thin that you could wad them up in a pocket, they would be unnoticeable, and you could always have it on your person. The thicker bags require careful folding and even so, take up a lot more space.
IMHO the law should mandate compostable bags be used.
Really, it seems like the service should also be able to pick up all the extra bags if you leave them on your door or something. Retail Whole Foods (sometimes, apparently it varies by location) gives you a discount if you bring your own bag, delivery could have a similar option for returning the reusable bags.
Damage to what? The bags? The food? The environment? I don't understand why bags built to be re-used is a bad thing.
> - People have to pay more to buy more expensive plastic bags to carry their goods that are ironically also wrapped in plastic.
If the food already being wrapped in plastic is a factor in how we bag the food, why do we need plastic bags at all? I don't see how this is relevant at all.
> - 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
This seems easily solvable with a "return extra bags" feature. If you're getting delivery, the delivery man will be back next week. Why can't he pick them up then?
> - People started stealing hand held shopping baskets
Well before the current bag ban, most of the stores near me (California) had done away with shopping baskets. People stealing/taking them has been a thing forever and they constantly need to be replenished (same with shopping carts).
> Here is how many times you would have to reuse a bag to have equal global warming impact:
The bag ban is not to combat global warming. It's about the plastic bags that do not make it to the landfill. They end up in waterways and on plants and inside or on the faces of animals. I don't think I've ever heard of one of these bills arguing to get rid of single-use bags for global warming or landfill reasons. It's almost always an anti-litter measure.
The environment. Reusable bags consume more resources to produce. So if you buy a reusable bag and throw it out, it's a net loss to the environment. If enough people are buying a resuable bag because they're not carrying around their reusable bags every time they buy something, it becomes a net lost because you're displacing cheap plastics bag (that are somewhat resuable) by more resource intensive resuable bags that don't get reused.
Any damage done by throwing away a one time use plastic bag is multiplied by throwing away a "reusable" plastic bag. People want one time plastic bags and they'll use reusable plastic bags like one time if you force them. These bags are built to be tougher so are more expensive, more carbon intensive to produce, stay around longer in landfills, [insert bad metric of plastic bag]
> If the food already being wrapped in plastic is a factor in how we bag the food, why do we need plastic bags at all? I don't see how this is relevant at all.
Because there is already plastic bags everywhere so its a farce to declare "plastic is okay in every part of the process except this final part".
> This seems easily solvable with a "return extra bags" feature. If you're getting delivery, the delivery man will be back next week. Why can't he pick them up then?
Because it costs them money, and effort and gasoline to do so and then they have to clean them and recycle them. It sounds like a nightmare and a huge liability to do so. No offense, but I imagine you don't have any experience in recycling or operations of a food chain. It's like someone telling an engineer "why don't they just make code unhackable"
> Well before the current bag ban, most of the stores near me (California) had done away with shopping baskets. People stealing/taking them has been a thing forever and they constantly need to be replenished (same with shopping carts).
Great consumers don't even have to option to steal shopping carts. I guess they can work on balancing food on their head. Problem solved.
> The bag ban is not to combat global warming. It's about the plastic bags that do not make it to the landfill. They end up in waterways and on plants and inside or on the faces of animals. I don't think I've ever heard of one of these bills arguing to get rid of single-use bags for global warming or landfill reasons. It's almost always an anti-litter measure.
This seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. How about you figure out how to get people not to pollute or to clean things up rather than just prevent them from having things that are super convenient.
patagonia makes or at least in 2010 made reusable grocery bags from spare ripstop nylon from recycled garments (or spare material). i've got to say, they're the best @$%^ing grocery bags...they fold into a wallet sized pouch too. though i get your point, it took like a day to prefer these to paper and plastic.
The plastic bags break down into microplastic particles, which makes its way into our intestines, lungs and reproductive systems:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-02968-x
We don’t know what we’re doing to our bodies here - it might be nothing, but I think it’s completely justified to pump the brakes regardless of carbon impacts.
Paper bag bans, I’ll grant you, seem pretty silly.
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.
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.
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.
Kind of like this, but smaller:
https://www.amazon.com/Household-Essentials-Utility-Pockets-...
And arguing reusable bags aren't as big as disposable plastic bags or can't carry as much is laughable. Bags can come in any shape or size. I assure you there are lots of reusable bags far larger than the typical disposable plastic shopping bags. A typical disposable plastic bag is like 22" H x 12" W x 6" D fully expanded (including handles in that 22", so really less for storage, more like maybe 16" if even that). Losing the handles you're talking ~1,150 cubic inches. The bag linked above is 13" H x 22" W x 11" D not including the handles. That's ~3,140 cubic inches. Which is a bigger number?
The vast majority of reusable shopping bags I've encountered and owned are much larger than standard disposable plastic shopping bags. Incredible seeing someone argue they just don't make bags bigger than average disposable shopping 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.
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.
Anyway I much prefer the reusable (fabric) bags. Much stronger, larger, easier to carry.
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.
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?
Uncertainty - "how to keep the fabric ones clean?"
Instilling doubt - clearly these reusable shopping bags just aren't as hygienic as the disposable ones. Yet another way to toss out the suggestion that these disposable bag bans aren't good, and we should stick to disposable bags, without directly stating it. Have other people reading these comments have that thought stuck in their mind, "oh yea, reusable bags aren't good, they'll have food contamination."
Unless you really think NBJack honestly never thought about laundering or washing fabrics. C'mon, even my three year old understands when fabrics get dirty they go in the washing machine.
> Unless you really think NBJack honestly never thought about laundering or washing fabrics.
I think that's infinitely more likely than some psych play trying to 'sow FUD' about... plastic bags.
I have a dog and an infant, so I seem to have an infinite supply of things best disposed of in plastic bags :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most places around me just stopped using straws. Only kids drinks and boba get straws now days.
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.
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_source...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...
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.
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.
Practically every self-checkout I use is like this experience. I put my reusable bags in the bagging area first, sometimes it asks, "Are you using your own bags?" but most stores just don't care. Then I can start scanning and just put things directly into my reusable bags. The checkout machines alerting on things like "unknown item in bagging area" seem to rarely ever happen.
Or even better yet, when I shop at places with scan and go I can take something off the shelf, scan the barcode with my phone, and put it straight into my bag in the shopping car. Then at the exit the LP person will sometimes scan the items in my bags, but often the store's cameras will automatically clear me to just walk out the store.
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?)
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.
- 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?