Ten years after California passed landmark legislation to reduce plastic bag use, the tonnage of discarded bags has skyrocketed. What happened?

It was a decade ago when California became the first state in the nation to ban single-use plastic bags, ushering in a wave of anti-plastic legislation from coast to coast.

But in the years after California seemingly kicked its plastic grocery sack habit, material recovery facilities and environmental activists noticed a peculiar trend: Plastic bag waste by weight was increasing to unprecedented levels.

According to a report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, 157,385 tons of plastic bag waste was discarded in California the year the law was passed. By 2022, however, the tonnage of discarded plastic bags had skyrocketed to 231,072 — a 47% jump. Even accounting for an increase in population, the number rose from 4.08 tons per 1,000 people in 2014 to 5.89 tons per 1,000 people in 2022.

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.

    • eltrain123@lemmy.world
      15·
      9 months ago

      Or taxing the shit out of plastic production…

      Tax the things you don’t want out of existence. Subsidize the things you want until they stand up on their own.

      We’ve been subsidizing oil and gas/petrochem plastic manufacturing for far too long.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
      10·
      9 months ago

      A better move would have been focusing on larger uses of plastic, or helping developing countries get a functioning waste system. Single use plastic bags are super public, but practically irrelevant in terms of oil use or plastic waste.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      9 months ago

      Banning plastic bags totally would’ve worked if not for the part of the law that allowed them to be legal if they were thicker.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
      2·
      9 months ago

      I assumed we already had. Years ago, the thin bags became too crappy to re-use for anything, but whenever i did, a year later they’d be all yellowed and disintegrating