Ten years ago, California had the first US state to ban plastic bags. But over the next few years, the state’s landfills actually had a increase in plastic waste. That’s because a loophole in the state’s bag ban allowed stores to continue offering plastic bags at checkout, as long as the bags cost a few cents, were labeled reusable and were made of thicker plastic. Of course, this thicker plastic meant that each new bag created more waste than its pre-ban counterpart when it found its way to a landfill.
The idea behind the original law was to encourage people to avoid single-use bags and instead bring their own reusable bags to the store. What policymakers don’t seem to have realized is that it will take more than a 10 cent fee to change people’s behavior.
California finally closed its loophole last month. The legislature updated the original law to prohibit all non-paper bags from being distributed at store checkouts.
“Instead of being asked, ‘Do you want paper or plastic?’ at checkout, consumers will simply be asked if they want a paper bag, if they didn’t bring a reusable bag,” said Democratic state senator Catherine Blakespear. statement. “This simple approach is easy to follow and will help dramatically reduce plastic bag pollution.”
Across the country, however, California’s pioneering efforts may have already spread not only copier bans, but also the loophole that undermines them. There are at least five other states — and possibly many more cities and counties — that have written the same exceptions into their regulations. Now that California’s mistake is becoming more public, efforts are underway to amend at least two other states’ existing bag bans. In states just now looking to enact their first plastic bag bans, lawmakers are careful not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.
“You need a complete ban on this stuff,” said Jack Egan, vice chairman for the Connecticut chapter of the marine conservation nonprofit Surfrider. “Otherwise you have a compromised, stymied, difficult-to-enforce, easily subverted ordinance.”
As with California’s original law, each of the five states whose bag bans still allow thicker plastic bags — Connecticut, Maine, Oregon, Rhode Islandand Washington – defines a “reusable” plastic bag to include those that exceed a certain thickness: typically 4 mils, although Washington’s law started at 2.25 mils – the standard set by California – and is supposed to be up to 4 to rattle in 2026. (One mil equals 0.0254 millimeters, comparable to the thickness of a dollar bill.)
The origin of this thickness standard appears to be unknown. Some environmental groups told Grist that when California lawmakers came up with the state’s original bag ban, they were trying not to outlaw sturdy, reusable bags that happened to be made of plastic, like those available in Trader Joe’s checkout lines is. But those bags are usual about 20 mils – 5 to 10 times thicker than what is allowed by plastic bag ban laws. Other environmental advocates suggested it was pressure from the plastics industry that prevented a more outright ban on all bags made of plastic “film” — that is, polyethylene that is thin and stretchy — that would have included thicker versions. The American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, a trade group, told the Hartford Courant in 2019 that “you can ban this product… but the alternative is worse, both economically and environmentally.”
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Melissa Gates, formerly the Northeast regional manager for Surfrider and now a director at Organizing for Impact, said Connecticut’s law was influenced by California’s, as well as by local ordinances from around the country. The version of the statewide ban backed by Surfrider included an exemption for thick plastic bags as a sort of “compromise” to win support from major food and retail industry associations. It worked.
“It allowed for thicker plastic bags, but only with a mandatory fee,” Gates said. The idea was to get rid of the most environmentally problematic bags – the very thin bags that are likely to quickly end up in the bin, get clogged in recycling machines or caught in tree branches – and then discourage people from buying the thicker ones by charging 10 . cents a pop. However, a last-minute change by Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont removed the mandatory fee for thicker plastic bags, a move that Surfrider complained at the time, as it removed the disincentive for consumers to reuse bags.
Even if the fee remained mandatory, however, it is doubtful that it would be high enough to get consumers to treat the thick bags differently than they would a free, thinner bag. For many people, 8 cents is an insignificant addition to their grocery bill, and not enough to prevent them from reusing thick bags only once or twice (if at all) — say, to cart their trash or clean up after their dogs . Then, when they return to the grocery store, they must buy new bags, which encourages the bags’ continued production.
“As an environmentalist and an advocate for social justice, I would prefer that we immediately stop making unnecessary things out of plastic,” Gates said.
Environmental advocates Grist spoke with said there is no active campaign to amend Connecticut’s bag ban, possibly due to fatigue over the decades-long back-and-forth that preceded passage of the state’s 2019 law . Rhode Island appears to be in a similar situation: When the state finally implemented a bag ban this yearmore than a decade after the idea was first introduced in the legislaturelawmakers were “so tired of talking about plastic bags,” Gates said.
But things are looking good in Oregon, where state Sen. Janeen Sollman, a Democrat, plans to introduce a bill next year that would expand the statewide bag ban to cover disposable plastic bags of any thickness. Sollman told Grist that she has long known about the problems with California’s first bag banand that she tried to circumvent them with Oregon’s first bag ban, enacted in 2019. The law increased the required thickness of a reusable bag from 2.25 mils to 4 mils to encourage reuse — but it didn’t work.
The plastics industry “just went there, made a thicker bag and then called it reusable,” Sollman said, even though that type of bag ended up “just being another piece of trash.”
Sollman said her upcoming bill will reflect that the new California law, which redefines “export bag” to include any bag – other than a recycled paper bag – provided to customers at checkout. The bill is also expected to propose a phase-out of single-use plastic toiletries, such as the kind offered in hotel rooms, along with some other measures to reduce plastic pollution.
AP Photo / Gilian Flaccus
Meanwhile, other states are experimenting with different language to close the big-pocket loophole — or prevent it from opening in the first place. New York State’s plastic bag ban says a reusable bag must be made of “cloth or machine washable material” or “other non-film plastic washable material.” (Keyword: “non-film.”) Colorado, Delaware, New Jerseyand Vermont says a bag is only reusable if it has “stitched handles”.
In Massachusetts, which does not yet have a statewide bag ban, Surfrider helped draft a bill which used a combination of several other states’ strategies, requiring a reusable bag to have stitched handles while also clarifying that it “shall not include a plastic film bag of any thickness.” Senator Jamie Eldridge, a Democrat who has spent the past decade working on a statewide bag ban, told Grist that language was introduced after the plastics industry floated the idea of allowing thicker plastic bags.
“It was one of their fields at one point,” he said. “So we looked at it” — and rejected it, after seeing the effects in other states and municipalities. “That’s why we strengthened the bill,” he added. This year’s version of the legislation passed the Senate, but is not expected to be voted on in the state’s House of Representatives; Eldridge said he plans to reintroduce it during the next session.
Erin Hass, director of the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, a trade group, said she does not support the Massachusetts bill, but that it supports the use of thicker plastic bags. “The reality is that consumers can take their film bags back to stores, which can then be redirected to the existing circular film recycling infrastructure,” she told Grist.
Previous investigations of ABC News and Bloomberg suggested that most of the plastic bags dumped in store drop-off bins are not recycled. More often they end up in landfills or incinerators.
The two other bag ban states with loopholes, Maine and Washington, do not have pending bills to change their laws. But that could change: Isabella DeFrancesco, Surfrider’s Northeast regional manager, said her organization’s Maine chapter is making it a “priority campaign” to get rid of that state’s fat pocket allowance next year. And in the state of Washington, the Department of Commerce is supposed to submit a report to the legislature is evaluating the effectiveness of its existing pocket law by the end of this year, giving lawmakers the opportunity to amend the thickness provision.
Heather Trim, executive director of the nonprofit Zero Waste Washington, said the legislature could be tied up in the next session by other plastic-related bills, but her organization plans to prioritize an updated bag ban in 2026, with language similar to California’s new law . .
“I think California got it right,” she said.
Gates, the former Surfrider executive, said she hopes a series of refreshing laws will reflect what has always been the intent of bag ban advocates: to eliminate single-use bags — whether paper or plastic — where they are not needed, and to get people to bring their reusable bags to the grocery store.
“The ultimate goal,” she said, is “to shift the consumer paradigm away from this wasteful tendency to view things as disposable, and prioritize convenience over almost everything else.”
