California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed Senate Bill 1053 banning all plastic bags at grocery stores in the state beginning in 2026.
In 2014, California passed a ban on plastic shopping bags, but a loophole allowed shoppers to still be able to purchase bags made of thicker plastic for a dime apiece.
A decade later, the choice will no longer be, “Paper” or “Plastic,” but “I brought my own,” “Paper” or “No, thanks.”
“Plastic bags create pollution in our environment and break into microplastics that contaminate our drinking water and threaten our health,” said State Director of California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) Jenn Engstrom in a press release from PIRG. “Californians voted to ban plastic grocery bags in our state almost a decade ago, but the law clearly needed a redo. With the Governor’s signature, California has finally banned plastic bags in grocery checkout lanes once and for all.”
Plastic bags not only pollute the environment, often almost immediately following their use, but break down into tiny toxic plastic pieces called microplastics that have found their way into drinking water, posing a threat to public health.
When California banned plastic grocery bags in 2014, they were the first state in the country to do so. But stores were still allowed to provide “reusable” and “recyclable” plastic bags at checkouts. Unfortunately most of these thicker plastic bags were not reused or recycled, exacerbating the state’s plastic waste problem.
The law did drastically reduce the total number of bags, but their thickness meant more plastic in the trash, reported The New York Times. In 2021, for every 1,000 people in the state, plastic bags weighing 5.89 tons were discarded, a CALPIRG analysis found. Seven years earlier, the same number of people had binned 4.08 tons.
According to CALPIRG, plastic bags are typically only used for 12 minutes, then thrown away. After their brief useful life, they end up in landfills and oceans, where they stay for hundreds of years, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces and posing a risk to marine life who ingest and get caught in them.
“Nothing we use for a few minutes should pollute the environment for hundreds of years,” said Laura Deehan, Environment California’s state director, in the press release. “Finally, with this necessary update to the bag ban, plastic grocery bags will no longer be a threat to sea turtles, birds, and other wildlife in California.”
Cristen is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. She holds a JD and an Ocean & Coastal Law Certificate from University of Oregon School of Law and an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of the short story collection The Smallest of Entryways, as well as the travel biography, Ernest’s Way: An International Journey Through Hemingway’s Life.
