Original Associated Press article instead of giving traffic to Voice of America
Edit: and a good LA Times article explaining the glaring flaw with the original 2014 law.
Thank you!
Yeah np; VOA is I feel overall pretty tame as national propaganda outlets go, but it’s nonetheless expressly conceived of and funded as a propaganda outlet, so that’s not much of a compliment.
Plus, a news agency article from its own website tends to have a better shelf life than syndicated versions of that article.
VOA seems very factual and accurate in their reporting. Their bias exists in that they’ll never report on something that doesn’t align with US interests.
Which isn’t the individual single use plastic bags every single item comes in.
It’s just the one final plastic bag, all the other plastic bags are carried in.I don’t have a problem with the move myself. I’m single, with a supermarket just up the street. I use my own hand basket for my groceries. I never even use a cart.
But this policy always strikes me a tackling the smallest, least effective part of the problem. Banning plastic packaging would be FAR more effective. But also much harder. So this is just a way for politicians to seem like they are doing something, when they really aren’t. In other words it’s pandering.Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Like @[email protected] said, this is closing a loophole that was in the original grocery bag reduction law.
I’m saying it shouldn’t be praised as a solution, but recognized as a very small step forward. Afterwhich we ramp up the pressure for real solutions.
I don’t think anyone is calling this the single solution to anything.
It’s simple another small step on the path.
Take enough steps and you’ll keep moving towards a goal
No, no, they’ve expended their political capital on this and that’s about all we’ll get from them, but just as long as someone tells you to not let perfect be the enemy of good, you must be satisfied with the outcome even if it achieves little to nothing.
Arguing against it or pointing out flaws means that you’re now arguing against “what’s good” and that’s morally and ethically wrong and shows that you’re an outsider to the in-group.
We can’t afford to think like this. Climate is such an unthinkably massive issue that we need all of it, and then some more, and then some more.
There is no project big enough that we don’t need 50,000 more projects of equivalent scope to get things where they need to be.
Think like what? Think this is just one small pice. Small enough that it almost doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t take any energy or news inches from the larger problem of plastic packaging? Because honestly, it sounds like we’re on the same page there.
Also plastics aren’t much of a climate issue. They’re part of a more broad environmental issue.
It might be unclear if you’re advocating a comprehensive plastic policy, or whataboutism directed at just one other use of plastic.
California has been working toward legislation that reduces plastic in packaging. It’s not as good as it should be, but it represents about as much departure from the status quo I think California can reasonably get when people raise so much fuss over even superfluous things like plastic straws and grocery bags (and because California is already really throwing around their weight here in compelling out-of-state producers to change their manufacturing). And this new law is just closing a loophole on a 2014 law that at worst was actively making things worse or at best was making the law fail to address the issue. This isn’t “pandering”; it’s addressing a real, ongoing, actual issue in a sensible way.
Excellent! That should be bigger news than this little stuff.
Yeah. The whole shit-show is depressing really.
Firstly, you’re entirely correct - it’s a tiny part of the problem.
Secondly, it shifts the “blame” for plastic on to consumers. “Oh we’ve been so bad all this time using plastic shopping bags”.
Thirdly, it provides a feeling of resolution. “I’m so happy now we’ve done the hard work to buy these $0.10 reusable shopping bags and solved the plastic problem”.
Fourthly, you have to wonder how many plastic shopping bags were actually single use. For example, a lot of them were made from recycled plastic, and a lot of them were re-used as garbage bags, which are now purchased anyway.
On balance, I think it’s within the realm of possibility that these laws do more harm than good. Honestly, just tax plastic producers and see how quickly producers using plastic to package their products magically fine innovative new alternatives.
to buy these $0.10 reusable shopping bags
This literal exact sentence tells me you didn’t read past the headline; those shitty $0.10, thicker “reusable” plastic bags are exactly the loophope in the 2014 ban that this 2024 law is designed to close. The thing you’re accusing this law of allowing people to do is the one thing it expressly outlaws. Media literacy is dead.
On balance, I think it’s within the realm of possibility that these laws do more harm than good. Honestly, just tax plastic producers and see how quickly producers using plastic to package their products magically fine innovative new alternatives.
Seriously. The way to solve this is to simply put a tax on all plastic packaging. Use those funds to subsidize plastic recycling. Set the tax at whatever level is necessary to make recycling viable. And if the most viable ‘recycling’ method is to just burn the plastic in an incinerator, so be it. Yeah, it’s expensive to build an industrial incinerator that can properly scrub and filter out all the nasty fumes plastic gives off when it’s burned. But it can be done. It’s more expensive than just stuffing the plastic in a landfill, but by burning it, we solve our plastic problem in the here and now, rather than letting it slowly leach out into the environment for future generations to deal with.
Recycling plastic will always be difficult, and it may never be practical for some cases. But all plastics burn. And if you have the right incinerator, they can be burned without releasing toxic fumes into the air. Tax plastic packaging, all of it. Tax it, and use the funds to subsidize plastic waste incineration. Plastic is made from oil, and it still can be used as a fuel. Burn it and be done with it.
I wouldn’t limit it to plastic packaging. Micro-plastics come from all plastic.
Packaging is more effective to ban but also a lot more nuanced. Plastic packaging was developed over a lot of years and the products are designed for it so it would need to be a much longer term project.
All the more reason to advocate for it, and not be distracted by a nearly meaningless win.
Banning these plastics is not about environmentalism. It’s about litter and having visually cleaner cities.
It seems easy to argue liter is part of environmental concerns and policy. Environment is a very flexible term.
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Looking at comments outside of Lemmy, I’m appaled by the number of people shocked by this already. Apparently, “just reuse your f-ing bags” is already too hard for a lot of people. We need to start from the easiest.
What do you do wrt vegetables? I always end up using those thin plastic bag to wrap them, even uf I bring a big reusable bag to carry it all out
I have a hand-held basket I got more than a decade ago from Staples. I just put all the loose fruit and veg in that.
We did it a while back, you will adapt pretty quickly.
In Austin we had a ban. The state overrode it a year later, but the damage was done…everyone realized how much easier it is to carry groceries in large tote bags that you can sling over your shoulder.
Or boxes; we use boxes. Carrying 3 - 4 boxes up stairs is much easier than 10 bags.
One time, I went to a small, family-owned grocery store that used cardboard boxes, and I can totally attest to this. The boxes are a transcendental experience.
Most NZ supermarkets just stack the boxes at the front after the checkout.
Are also keep a few in the back of the car.
I have giant tote bags and can usually fit almost all my groceries in one. Slinging that over my shoulder is easier to carry than boxes
I have 3 hungry boys to feed, I’m not sure I could carry all of our groceries in one trip. , 😁
Portland’s done it too. If you want plastic bags, they’re big and reusable and fairly expensive. Paper is really the only option at most places now. That said, I really wanna see the reusable cheap plastic ones banned, cause no one really reuses them.
They banned single use a decade ago. My family switched to reusable bags. A lot of stores realized that they could sell “reusable” plastic bags, thicker single use bags, and get around the law.
So the rollout went like this, stores gives you free plastic bags your entire life, about a week where people were told “no plastic bags, you gotta bring your own,” then the plastic bags were back but a bit different and the store would sometimes charge you a bag fee (although a lot of places effectively waived the fee). This meant that no one adapted and they continued doing what people had always done with their plastic bags, sone reuse, mostly discard.
People always complain about unintended consequences of laws, I’ve always gotten the impression from those people they would prefer we don’t make the laws. I would love it though if we could iterate on our laws faster than, pass the law, every company finds a loophole a week later, close loophole after a decade of unintended consequences.
And yea, having reusable bags is not difficult.
I just wish they would ban the plastic bags and force paper bags. The thick plastic bag problem came from not mandating paper only. Plus a lot of those polyester bags were so poorly made, they didn’t last long enough to male a difference.
Maybe it’s just me wanting to go back to the stores of my youth when plastic was a rarity.
good. My balls are already maxed out on microplastics
Microplastic is stored in the balls
Mine are stored in the toenails, Mountain Dew is stored in my balls.
Might need to get that looked at
Can we ban plastics in the fishing industry next?
I know little to nothing about fishing on a commercial scale. What are viable alternatives to plastics in that industry?
Hemp it would be a viable alternative due to its rot resistant properties.
Hemp was used as the primary material for this purpose until the oil industry helped feed the anti-cannabis movement.
Interesting. I was thinking more about lines and lures. It didn’t occur to me that such a large amount of ocean trash would be plastic based rope and nets.
Commercial fishing is terrible not only for the environment but leaves a large amount of trash in the ocean. It creates a ton of micro plastics and fucks up entire biomes.
if you ever watch a documentary of the great pacific garbage patch it usually shows the most rampant and dangerous items from aquatic life tends to be discarded fishing nets. They all suck though, just nets suck more and get cut off all the time.
Commercial fishing is probably the biggest contributor to ocean plastic pollution.
Much like commercial industry is the biggest contributor to atmospheric pollution.
You know, I think I’m beginning to see a trend here.
Fishing industry is evil and sucks big times. They just dump their gear (e.g. nets and longlines) in the open water and it’s a bane for turtles, sharks, whales, sea birds, seals etc. It’s not an accident. The gear seems to be deliberately dumped as the expensive stuff is removed. Read this article if you want to know why they do it. In addition those trawler/fish factory vessels are often part of ghost fleets where 75% of them kill every living being within a miles long radius for weeks on end without any controlling instance.
If you’re now under the assumption that it would be better to buy fish from fish farms. It also sucks tremendously. At least when farmed in open pen sea cages out of multiple reasons:
- Pesticides and Antibiotics are released into the sea
- Viruses and parasites escape into the sea
- Salmons escape and alter natural biodiversity
- Excess food and waste lead to oxygen deprivation in the surrounding waters (dead zones)
https://www.worldwildlife.org/industries/farmed-salmon
In addition (and I don’t know why WWF isn’t calling it out): Whales are essentially hunted because of farmed fish. That’s my own conclusion. They don’t openly admit it but because whales need tons of krill they are a direct competition to the omega-3 supplement market and feed for salmon farms. The culprits are Norway (they are real eco terrorists if you look behind their green facade at home), Ruzzia, Japan & Scottland. Not only whales but also penguins and seals depend on krill. And those animals are already suffering from H5N1 (with animal agriculture being the culprit again).
What the greedy bastards don’t get is, when they kill off the whales, they kill off the krill too. As so often humans disturb eco systems developed over millions of years. In this case it’s the poop loop.
The intention of my wall of text is to move the people who have a modicum of interest left to save the oceans to consider to ditch any fish caught in the oceans or bred on salmon farms (btw they are feeding them chicken bones too). Humans need Omega 3 DHA & EPA fatty acids. You can easily get those via algae capsules. That’s where fish get theirs from essentially.
Only we the consumers have the power to break the vicious circle but we’re to uneducated and complacent. As long as there’s a market they’ll ruthlessly plunder the ecosystems till nothing is left. Some say we’re already nearing that moment with parts of the oceans.
What asshole downvoted a legit question of someone asking for more info on something they admit they don’t know much about…?
People do this all the time, and it’s super annoying. I’d love for someone to explain why they downvote an honest question.
I do it accidentally sometimes. Especially right now since im pretty sure my instances last update moved everything a bit to the right for some reason.
The downvotes you and I got are “funny”
One viable alternative is to use nothing and let the fish live their lives.
And then Jesus gave them fish to eat, taught men to lead other men to water and teach them to fish and feed them forever, on fish.
Yes, this is what’s commonly known as a “joke” where Jesus is a stand-in for muix and the audience is the downvoters, and it is an exaggeration made for comedic effect. I’m not basing my actual morality on the God of the Bible – the same entity as Jesus if you’re unitarian or essentially the same entity with some mental gymnastics thrown in if you’re trinitarian – who had a temper tantrum and flooded the entire Earth to wipe all but one human family and two of every species of animal from the face of the planet.
Fishing is catastrophic for the environment, and it results in the needless deaths of literal trillions of fish every year.
Well then it must be too late for salvation, as so many men have already learnt to fish.
I remember save the trees campaign years ago. I’m convinced it was all started by the plastic industry.
Yup. Logging industry, at least in the US, is remarkably renewable. I remember reading that we have significantly more trees than we did 100 years ago because we’ve improved logging methods. No more clear cutting for pulp or lumber, proper replanting, and age-tracking for proper harvest.
In other words, saying “don’t use paper, save a tree” is akin to saying “don’t eat fries, save a potato.”
We have more trees, yes, but we have fewer forests.
Forests are where the biodiversity is. Not monoculture straight-row tree farms.
And we’ve gotten rid of a lot of old growth forests before we came into renewable forestry. That’s partly why lumber these days isn’t as good (quality, in general) as it was 50 or 100 years ago.
And we’re still tearing down old forests. This time, it’s to grow soy to feed to cows.
hardly any soy goes to cows at all.
https://ourworldindata.org/images/published/Global-soy-production-to-end-use.png
The cultivation of soybeans, primarily for export and the production of biodiesel and animal feed, has been a significant driver of forest loss in the Amazon.[41]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_rainforest
almost all soy that becomes animal feed is a byproduct of pressing soybeans for oil. about 80% of all soybeans are pressed for oil and the byproduct is what is fed to animals. but cattle, as you can see in the chart I provided, hardly get any of the global soy crop
Are you …defending deforestation of the Amazon? For what, cheaper burgers? Cattle ranching is the number one cause of deforestation by a wide margin. Soy is just one of the causes.
Are you …defending deforestation of the Amazon?
no. I’m pointing out a lie about Amazon soy being fed to cows
While this is true, we should also remember that old growth forest, not tree plantations, are the most efficient at sequestering carbon and filtering/storing water.
Just because the timber industry is has been adopting renewable aspects, doesn’t justify expanding it recklessly. Reducing demand and recycling as much paper as possible is still a key part of keeping our usage sustainable. Even if the trees grow back, there is still energy being lost to harvesting and processing. Tree falls are a major source of carbon sequestration in forests, which enrich the soil. If the trees are being harvested, that piece of the local cycle stops. I try to vary the locations that I collect kindling wood in my back woods so as not to deplete any area.
Trees are the most visible and obvious carbon sink. You can watch a tree grow over a few years by literally sucking carbon out of thin air. I live in a bog where the trees all fall down after a few years. Quite a few come down every windy season. You can see how they shape the landscape, dam waterflow, and turn into soil mounds. The dammed water helps to trap more plant matter and sequester more carbon. Removing the trees from this ecosystem by harvesting would interrupt this process. This process maintains the soil fertility. The trees still grow back for now, but our lack of consideration for soil health and for soil as a carbon sink reminds me of our attitude towards conventional industrial agriculture. If we keep treating the soil like this, will the trees keep growing back in 50 years without requiring artificial fertilizers and water filtration to replace the trees we extract?
In Austria, we banned plastic bags ~ 5 years ago. We only have paper bags that are ~ 70c each. Before that we had 30c plastic bags.
Oh, and that is the price per bag. People here just get some high quality bags, baskets… and use them over and over.
Crafty people: If you don’t already, you should learn about plarn, aka yarn made from cut up disposable plastic shopping bags.
My wife makes it and turns it into forever bags.
I’m sorry.
If you want to make them, for the sake of making them. As an art project or something, that’s fine I guess.
But as a functional blanket? That seems like the worst thing I can imagine.Ok? First of all, the site says that it uses plarn for part of the weaving. Secondly, you don’t have weave with it or make a blanket. As I said, my wife knits them into forever bags.
As long as it also requires them to carry paper bags that’s perfect
In my country (Jamaica) you either have to beg to use their old boxes from inventory or just carry it all out by hand if you forget your bags.
Canada works pretty well without them. If you forget your bags though you have to buy more.
I keep several reusable bags and I’ve almost never had to use the paper ones. The few times I have, the bags fell apart halfway home lol.
In France they didn’t always have bags available, and if they did they were usually for sale and were reusable. Everyone just brought their own bags.
As long as you don’t expect them to be free
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If they don’t just tell them you need help to your car.
My gf got me into bringing my own grocery bags and after a few times forgetting to bring them in, I got used to it. Now it’s automatic and can’t see doing it any other way.
I used to forget my bags all the time until I got some actual nice bags made for groceries. They’re way bigger, sturdy enough to hold anything, and can stand freely as I load groceries in them. I don’t forget them now.
Excellent! Now, please ban single use plastics in most consumer packaging. We devised solutions to many of these for centuries or longer before most stuff went to plastic unnecessarily. Very little actually requires single-use plastic.
I don’t consider petrochemical wax paper much better and that’s what they were using before for many things like meat. Glass would be good though.
Even just food aside, we use so much plastic for things like LED light bulb packaging, toys, packing materials like bubble wrap and air bags, monobags for clothes, plastic shrink wrap or uncuttable plastics at hardware stores, markets, etc.
Like, outside of sterile single use plastics for keeping needles clean at the doctor, and maybe certain biohazards like raw meat juice, we don’t really need most plastics in consumer applications. Balsa wood, cardboard, metals, glass, rubber, paper, and waxed paper can do much of the heavy lifting.
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In Seattle we did this years ago. In practice, people just treat the new “reusable” bags as disposable. This law is a stop gap and ultimately kicks the can down thr road to placate business interests and the bullshit plastic lobby.
Bring on the downvotes, folks, but the reality is that now people will be throwing away thicker plastic.
Those are the bags this law bans.
Yeah no. Plastic bags given in the UK were around 8.5 billion in 2014, which reduced to under half a billion by 2023 just from introducing a charge.
In Hawaii every county did it independently around 10 years ago. Some counties have done it better than others. I don’t think I’ve had a single plastic bag on the big island in that entire time, but when I’m on Oahu I occasionally get them (for example the Apple Store thicker plastic bags that are “reusable”—somewhat true).
I don’t see people treating reusable bags as disposable, but it’s also completely acceptable here to just bring a cart full of stuff unbagged from target to your car here if you didn’t bring bags (groceries people will get paper if they forgot). I don’t think that’s as acceptable other places.
That doesn’t line up with my experience. Canada banned single-use bags in 2023, and I notice a lot less reusable bags discarded on the street than the single-use ones before the ban.
That depends on how Canada implemented their plastic bag ban.
California’s ban allowed “reusable” bags, which the plastics industry interpreted to produce bags that looked a lot like the thin single use bags, but of thicker plastic, and consumer habits weren’t changed by much.
In Austin, most grocery stores switched to paper and sold canvas when we had our ban. Only Texas’ beloved H‑E‑B decided to sell thick plastic replacement bags and has continued to do so post-ban. Hopefully the California law counts these stupid thick bags as plastic in their ban.
Those stupid thick bags are exactly the 2014 loophole that this 2024 ban is closing.
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Grocery Outlet in IB and CV both offer plastic bags to me even as I am putting my backpack, or one of their reusable bags on the counter.
Not sure about north of San Diego, though.
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For anyone wondering why a new law would target reusable bags as well, the phrasing of the old law basically encouraged stores to replace single use plastic bags with reusable plastic bags. Reusable bags use more plastic so they’re sturdier and last longer, but they were treated as single use bags anyways so functionally we were just producing and subsequently wasting more plastic.
I haven’t read this new law but hopefully it encourages or requires actually using paper bags or cardboard boxes or something if you don’t have your own reusable bag. It would be a shame if it just kicks the can down the road again and people buy reusable bags in the checkout aisle that they throw away when they get home instead of keeping in the car.
So now instead of having plastic bags that can be re-used to line small trash bins or dispose of cat litter or pick up dog poo in the park, people need to buy single-use plastic garbage bags. Smart.
Can you honestly say that you actually use most of those bags? If you do, you’re in an extreme minority. I throw away the ones with holes (a good chunk of them) because they can’t be used as garbage bags (and they’re notoriously difficult to recycle making most jurisdictions not even accept them; grocery stores who “take” them will often just send them to places like grocery warehouses which will unceremoniously throw them away). But despite the fact that I’ve been using my own bags for months only occasionally supplementing them with the thin, plastic store-provided ones when I physically don’t have enough and the fact that I’m choosy with them, I still have a backlog of literal hundreds of shitty little plastic grocery bags sitting under my sink from when I didn’t have my own bags. The cat litter or dog poop thing assumes that the person with the bag owns a cat or a dog (less than 60% in California, and this is still overgenerous because cats and dogs aren’t the only pets) and that most of them use their grocery bags for waste disposal, which doesn’t seem realistic.
That’s not even including the gargantuan amount of bags that go to waste before you even get your hands on them. I can’t tell you in my short time working at a grocery store how many bags get thrown away because they’re defective or get ripped. I vividly remember multiple times getting a stack of literal hundreds of bags that’s supposed to go on a bag rack, and a defect across the entire “ream” meant that I couldn’t situate it on the rack correctly. Those all went straight into the trash.
Not the op, but we do use them in my house too. We use every one that we get. We can line them with paper (we collect our junk mail paper for this purpose) to prevent leaks if there happen to be any tiny holes.
Use a bag daily during dinner prep to collect all the food trash and packaging and stuff that needs to be moved to the main trash can. Also use them as small trash bags in the bathroom and bedrooms.
Using one bag every single day for dinner prep just to put its contents in the “main” bin seems wildly inefficient compared to just having a larger bag in your kitchen or bringing those same contents to the trash via a reusable bucket. Using bags inefficiently is better than not using them at all, but it still suggests a net benefit from banning store-issued plastic grocery bags. Having such easy access to them incentivizes people to reuse them in frivolous ways if they even reuse them at all, and I think this illustrates that.
It is somewhat ineffecient spacewise. But my area tends to have fruit fly problems during the summer, so we use the smaller plastic bags to more tightly seal food waste to keep fruit flies from getting to it. Also reduces odors from the trash
I use all of the ones I get as trash bags. If they ban them here I’ll have to buy small plastic bags instead of reusing the ones from groceries. Either way it’s going to be the same amount of plastic, only now I’ll be paying extra.
people need to buy single-use plastic garbage bags.
or maybe they really don’t? not every bit of trash needs to be contained in a tiny plastic bag.
edit: for example, instead of dedicated bag for cat litter I can usually fit it in a partially empty large trash bag from around the house (as I take it out to the toter). And for dog poop I buy corn-starch based biodegradable bags.
At the least the garbage bag could be made of biodegradable or plant-based plastic.
The road to mitigating climate change and pollution will be filled with small inconveniences. In the grand scheme of things, is it really that big of a deal to spend a few cents on bags that are much more likely to end up properly disposed of to reduce the outsized amount of plastic bag litter and energy/oil spent on creating said bags?
