For anyone who’s shopped at Trader Joe’s, it’s already a familiar choice: You can carry your groceries out in a paper bag or perhaps a spare cardboard box, in a tote you brought from home or — if you’re shopping lightly/daringly — by hand.
What you can’t use is a plastic bag issued by Trader Joe’s. The store doesn’t give them out.
A bill two local lawmakers introduced Thursday, Feb. 8, in Sacramento would apply the Trader Joe’s policy statewide, banning stores from offering customers any sort of plastic film bags at checkout.
If you’re thinking “didn’t we already do that?” the answer is yes and no.
A decade ago, California legislators approved the nation’s first ban on the flimsy single-use plastic bags then commonly offered at most stores. Plastic bag manufacturers fought back, with the question put to voters in 2016. More than 53% of Californians voted to uphold the ban, which kicked in the next day.
But that law included a carveout that lets stores sell thicker plastic bags, typically at 10 cents each, since those are deemed “reusable.” And Jenn Engstrom, state director for the public interest advocacy group CALPIRG, said plastic bag companies have taken advantage of that loophole by mass producing thicker plastic bags that are sometimes now the only option for shoppers who don’t bring their own reusable tote.
The problem, data shows, is that most people still aren’t taking those bags back to grocery stores. The thicker bags also are just about impossible to recycle, since they need to go to special facilities. So while Californians are using fewer plastic bags, and those bags aren’t showing up as often during coastal cleanup days, data shows residents are actually producing more plastic bag by weight per person now than they did before the ban took effect.
The weight of plastic shopping bags thrown away by Californians in 2004, for example, was 147,038 tons, or roughly 8 pounds per person, according to CalRecycle….
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