Ban plastic bags, statewide

The bill to ban single-use plastic carryout bags is back, and California has never been more ready for it. A third of Californians, including shoppers in the city of Los Angeles, already must either use their own reusable bags at the supermarket or pay a small fee for a paper one. It’s time to bring the other two-thirds of Californians into line.

The newest version of the bill by state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) has a few twists that should be amended, but overall it outlines a sane approach to replacing plastic bags while minimizing the inconvenience for consumers. It would at first affect only food stores, including big-box stores with grocery departments. In a couple of years, the rules would extend to pharmacies and stores with pharmaceutical departments.

Under Padilla’s proposal consumers would still be able to stuff their fruits and vegetables into the small plastic bags without handles that are usually available in the produce department. The only bags that would be banned are the familiar flimsy ones that are used to bag items at the checkout stand; they’re the ones that make up most of the plastic trash in waterways and along beaches.

From there, they make their way into the ocean, where they join giant patches of floating plastic debris. The plastic is often eaten by marine animals, making it impossible for them to ingest enough food; plastic bags also choke sea birds and other marine life.

SB 270 would allow stores to sell paper bags, but it would require that they charge at least 10 cents for each one to discourage shoppers from using them. Stores could also sell plastic bags made to last for more than 100 grocery trips for about the same price.

To sweeten the pot for other bag manufacturers, the bill would create a one-time fund of $2 million that they could tap for retooling facilities and retraining workers. It’s not much money, but the fund shouldn’t be necessary. Far-sighted companies will adjust to the changing landscape on their own.

One advantage to a statewide law should be uniformity, so that chain stores and consumers aren’t confronted with a regulatory patchwork of rules depending on which city limits they happen to have crossed. Yet Padilla’s bill would allow existing local rules to take precedence over the the state law. The legislation should be amended to fix that.

The state has come a long way since 2006, when the Legislature yielded to the bag industry’s complaints by forbidding cities to impose fees on plastic bags, but every year the industry’s lobbying has stopped a full bill from passing. Californians toss away more than 110,000 tons of plastic bags each year; too many of those become a marine hazard that we can prevent with the minor inconvenience of bringing our own bags to the supermarket.