California’s Nanny State War on Plastic Bags Backfired…Bigly

California’s Nanny State War on Plastic Bags Backfired…Bigly

Legal Insurrections has covered California’s nanny state attempts to reduce plastic bag usage in the state by mandating grocery stores charge 10 cents for every single-use bag given to a customer.

It has several unintended consequences. The move contributed to an outbreak of hepatitis A in San Diego‘s homeless community, as vagrants used those bags for feces control.

Back in 2020, plastic bag bans posed a challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic because the reusable totes harbor germs and bacteria. Subsequently, San Francisco reversed its 13-year ban on plastic bags. The extreme liberal city banned reusable grocery totes!

The plastic bag rules are continuing to backfire…bigly.

When state legislators passed a 2014 law banning single-use plastic bags, the hope was that it would notably reduce the amount of discarded plastic. But fast-forward nearly a decade: Californians are tossing more pounds of plastic bags than before the legislation was passed.

That’s according to a recent report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, which took population changes into account and found the tonnage of discarded bags rose from 4.08 per 1,000 people in 2014 to 5.89 per 1,000 people in 2022.

How could this happen?

As Susanne Rust reported this week, plastic bag manufacturers replaced one kind of plastic bag for another. You’ve probably noticed them at grocery stores or had them loaded into your car during a drive-up order. These newer bags are thicker and meet technical specifications to be called “reusable.”

As Jenn Engstrom, CALPIRG’S state director, explained to Susanne, the switch created a loophole because the newer bags — which typically cost 10 cents — “are clearly not being reused and don’t look like reusable bags and … just circumvent the law’s intent.”

The grocery stores cleverly used the regulations to their advantage…as any responsible and profitable business would.

‘It was just emerging in the marketplace, but it happened to be made by a couple of California companies … which the manufacturers claimed they could certify as being reusable,’ he added.

Since the bags were made from 20 percent recyclable material and recyclable, Murray said, ‘we said, all right, fine. We’re gonna put that specific criteria into the law.’ But he claimed that experiment ‘failed.’

Mark Gold, director of Water Scarcity Solutions, who worked on the original legislation, described the move as a ‘gaping hole’ in the law.

These reusable bags, made of the material called HDPE, are ‘thicker and heavier’ than the LDPE plastic bags used previously.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that only 8.7% of plastic are recycled. And it turns out recycling wastes energy and resources.

A recycled product is the sum of the energy put into producing the virgin plastic + the energy put into recycling it. Wherever processing is involved, energy is expended. Unfortunately that energy often comes from fossil fuels – surprise, surprise.

There are valuable lessons to learn from the consequences of the plastic bag bans. However, this being California, our legislators will learn nothing and continue to base their policies on pseudoscience and utopia narratives.

Let me introduce you to SB 54, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in 2022.

That sweeping law seeks to phase out single-use plastics through a policy concept known as Extended Producer Responsibility, which shifts the onus of waste from consumers, towns and cities to companies manufacturing products with environmental impacts.

The law also grants plastics companies extensive oversight and authority in terms of the program’s management, execution and reporting, via a Producer Responsibility Organization, which will be made up of industry representatives.

The legislation requires that by Jan. 1, 2028, at least 30% of plastic items sold, distributed or imported into the state be recyclable. By 2032, that number rises to 65%. It also calls for a 25% reduction in single-use plastic waste by 2032 and provides CalRecycle with the authority to increase that percentage if the amount of plastic in the economy and waste stream grows.

In the case of expanded polystyrene, that number needs to reach 25% by 2025. If the number isn’t hit, the ubiquitous, hard-to-recycle foamy plastic will be banned.

I am looking forward to sharing more California “unintended consequences” stories with you sometime in the near future.

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