California has had a unique plastic bag rule for quite some time now. Gone are the days of flimsy and free grocery bags, now are the times of higher quality, more reusable 10-cent bags. This was done as a means to ideally limit single use plastic and push people to be more environmentally conscious. Many states began to follow suit with similar legislations, but it was not entirely helpful everywhere in the way they intended it to be. Plastic bag waste by weight increased tenfold in California after the law was passed.
In the year the law passed to remove the flimsy, free bags, 157,385 tons of plastic bag waste was discarded.
In 2022, there was a reported waste weight of 231,072, which showed an increase by 47%. While the instinct is to assume this jump is due to population growth, that is not the case as even the weight per capita shows a high increase. It turns out that the law kind of backfired. People do not mind the 10-cent cost of a bag, nearly as much as the state leaders assumed they would. Because people end up buying bags every grocery trip still, they use the thicker bags, which has led to more plastic waste.
The allowance for a thicker plastic bag at the cost of 10-cents was written into one small portion of the law.
The director of Californians Against Waste, Mark Murray, released a statement saying, “It was a conscious decision to create a pathway for a type of reusable bag that barely existed.” However now, the reusable aspect has backfired as not enough people are actually reusing the bags, most are buying every trip and throwing them out afterwards.
The bags themselves are made up of partially recycled materials, about 20% of the bag to be exact. When a person has gotten plenty of uses out of the bags, they were intended to then be recycled once again, This was never done before so California lawmakers decided to pass these bags into law with the plastic ban law, essentially as an experiment. Now, they see that the experiment failed.
California lawmakers are hoping to redeem themselves with a new law that will ban these thicker bags from being in stores as well, pushing people officially to utilize reusable bags.
