Environmentalists gathered at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas last Saturday for a beach cleanup and a push to ban plastic grocery bags at store checkouts. The group included elected officials, activists from the Surfrider Foundation and even a woman dressed in a suit made from plastic bags.
“I wear this as a visual representation of what the American family uses in one month. It’s 120 bags,” said Jessica Ullyott, dressed as the “bag monster.”
Support of Senate Bill 1053 was at the center of Saturday’s rally. The bill has a companion bill in the Assembly and they are both headed for a floor vote before California’s legislative session ends next week.
The Senate bill is sponsored by Democratic State Senator Catherine Blakespear, from Encinitas. It would force grocery stores to stop offering customers plastic bags at their checkout counters, instead selling only recyclable paper bags.
“They wouldn’t have the option of paper or plastic, which is what we all hear at the grocery store. Paper or plastic!” Blakespear said. “It would just be paper if you didn’t happen to have your reusable bag with you.”
The bill is meant to close a loophole in California’s first plastic bag ban that was passed 10 years ago. That allowed the sale of thicker plastic bags at grocery store checkouts by calling them reusable and recyclable.
In practice they have been neither of those. The government agency CalRecycle does not include plastic carryout bags in their list of recyclable materials.
The California Grocers Association (CGA) concedes that consumers rarely reuse the thicker plastic bags now available at checkout.
Director of communications for the CGA Nate Rose puts part of the blame for that on an executive order banning the use of reusable grocery bags during the pandemic. Then health officials thought the bags might be helping to spread the disease.
“There is a sense that people lost the habit of bringing their reusable bags from home,” Rose said, adding that people started just getting new bags at checkout. “And they were not reusing them. They were just using them once, which doesn’t really fit with the original intent.”
The CGA supports the passage of SB 1053.
CalRecycle says 14% of the state’s waste stream is plastic, which does not biodegrade and is difficult to recycle. Blakespear says banning plastic grocery bags would help eliminate the trash we see in every public space.
“There are ways that we set up our system where we create a lot of waste and there are equivalent ways to set it up where we don’t,” she said. “So this would eliminate a huge source of plastic waste pollution that we have everywhere.”
The Assembly version of the bill is AB 2236, carried by Democratic Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of San Ramon.
