‘It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags – the evidence shows just the opposite’
After forcing California grocery shoppers into “reusable” plastic bags at .10 cents a piece, flighty lawmakers are trying to ban them outright now. California lawmakers have voted to do away with reusable plastic bags – again.
Assembly Bill 2236 and Senate Bill 1053, authored by Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) and Senator Catherine Blakespear (D-Encinitas), propose to ban any kind of plastic bag at food stores and convenience stores. Both bills will act as an expansion of SB 270, a 2014 bill that was approved of by voters in 2016 as Proposition 67, which banned all “one time use” plastic bags, and only allowed thicker plastic bags to be purchased in stores.
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Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. We hear this daily and see those orders nearly everywhere. Paper or plastic? Separate out your wet garbage and put it in another recyclable food bin. Separate bottles and cans. Compost. Rinse. Repeat.
Yet none of this has reduced landfills. And recyclers in California are going broke. According to CalRecycle, statewide recycling rate dropped significantly from 2020.
And don’t lawmakers Bauer-Kahan and Blakespear have more important issues they should be addressing instead of pretending to care about plastic bags: Escalating crime, a growing drug-addicted homeless population, increasing energy costs, energy shortages, failing public schools, pro-Palestine protesters on college campuses threatening Jewish students… oh, and a $73 billion budget deficit?
CalRecycle reports legislation signed by Gov. Newsom requires all packaging be recyclable or compostable by 2032, with 65% of it recycled by 2032, shifting the burden from the consumer to the packaging producer. Expect prices to go up – again.
And now comes more legislation to ban plastic bags. But banning plastic grocery bags does not reduce disposal and recycling costs, studies over the last 9 years have shown.
And their lies, environmental myths, exaggerations and misinformation that have been spread about plastic bags have led many to believe that plastic bags kill 100,000 sea mammals and one million seabirds each year. Each of the bill authors have used this emotional argument and trotted out the much-used photo of a turtle with plastic bag in its mouth as proof. Not only is the story about the turtle not true, The London Times exposed the dead sea mammals and seabirds as a myth based on a typographical error. The original report mentioned discarded fishing tackle including fishing nets, not plastic bags. David Santillo, a marine biologist at Greenpeace, told The Times: “It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite.”
In 2009, when plastic bag bans were all the rage in cities around the country, and paper bags were considered tree killers, I reported in the Washington Examiner:
San Francisco’s ban on plastic bags has not provided the environmental results it expected. Anticipated environmental gains resulting from the ban were “nonexistent at best,” and the ban likely did more harm than good. Consumers just switched from single plastic to double paper bags; few consumers remembered reusable totes, which caused delays in checkout; and recycling bins were hard to find or nonexistent.
Additionally, A recent microbiological study found unacceptably high levels of bacterial yeast, mold and fecal bacteria counts reside in the reusable bags (nastysack.com).
The study found that 64 percent of the reusable bags tested were contaminated with some level of bacteria, and close to 30 percent had elevated bacterial counts higher than what’s considered safe for drinking water. Further, 40 percent of the bags had yeast or mold, and some of the bags had an unacceptable presence of fecal intestinal bacteria when there should have been zero.
They are only now realizing that their low-carbon footprint bag is also filled with nasty bacteria if not washed regularly. A recent microbiological study found unacceptably high levels of bacterial yeast, mold and fecal bacteria counts reside in the reusable bags (nastysack.com).













