Will California's new proposed ban on plastic bags work?

California has announced it wants to ban all plastic shopping bags by 2026. The new bill, was unveiled in the state legislature by Democratic state Senator Catherine Blakespear. The US state has already banned thin plastic shopping bags in 2014. Voters in 2016 gave the ban a nod during a referendum. But what is it doing and why? And will the new ban work? Let’s take a closer look: What it is doing and why As per The Times of San Deigo, the Senate Bill 1053 would halt the sale of plastic film bags that are currently sold at checkout to consumers by most California stores. The proposed law would raise standards for reusable bags and mandate that stores give consumers 100 per cent recycled paper bags. The bills say consumers can bring their own recyclable bags. California is making this move because the current ban on plastic bags isn’t working. Shoppers during checkout can still purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that supposedly makes them reusable and recyclable.

The problem, Blakespear pointed out, is that people are not doing their bit.

She quoted a California study showing that the average person threw nearly 5 kilos of plastic shopping bags in the garbage every year in 2021. That, compared to just 3.62 kilos of trash per year in 2004. “It shows that the plastic bag ban that we passed in this state in 2014 did not reduce the overall use of plastic. It actually resulted in a substantial increase in plastic,” Blakespear said. “We are literally choking our planet with plastic waste.” As per The Times of San Diego, lawmaker Ben Allen, from Santa Monica, demanded that the 2014 ban be widened. Allen noted that while California was the first state to ban “thin throw-away bags,” the state’s “bag ban policy has fallen behind those in other states.” “We can and must do better,” Allen, the chairs the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, added. According to LA Times, California in 2014 became the first US state to ban single-use plastic bags. Twelve states, including California, already have some type of statewide plastic bag ban in place, according to the environmental advocacy group Environment America Research & Policy Center. Hundreds of cities across 28 states also have their own plastic bag bans in place. If the Legislature passes this bill, it would be up to Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom to decide whether to sign it into law. As San Francisco’s mayor in 2007, Newsom signed the nation’s first plastic bag ban. Will it work this time? Some experts say that it should make a difference this time – if the right move is made. Jenn Engstrom, state director for the California Public Interest Research Group, or  CALPIRG, told the newspaper plastic bag bans work “but not the way California does it.” Thicker bags “end up harming our environment and littering our communities just as much as the thinner ones. It’s time to finally ban plastic bags once and for all,” she added.

Jan Dell, who was a chemical engineer for over three decades, told LA Times the 2014 law was a failure.

She said rather than focus on recycling, California needs to follow in the footsteps of New York and New Jersey and do away with plastic bags entirely. Matthew Clough, executive director of Plastic Beach, a nonprofit, added that human beings need to change the way they look at recycling. “We need to look at this like we did with sewage back in the Middle Ages,” he said. “A water treatment plant would not be able to survive if it was just run as a for-profit. Because sewage has no real value to it. And that’s really what we need to look at recycling as.” With inputs from agencies