I've written about this before as my home state of NJ enforced a similar ban a little while ago. In our case, they banned paper bags as well!

It all points to a larger question: who is writing these laws?? It's such an anti-human law. It makes your life considerably worse off in a noticeable way. And it doesn't actually reduce waste, but makes things worse. Here is a few things that happened:

- Reusable bags have to be reused dozens of times to make up for the additional environmental impact, so damage likely went up

- People have to pay more to buy more expensive plastic bags to carry their goods that are ironically also wrapped in plastic.

- Whole Foods home delivery had to send you more sturdy and expensive "reusable" bags. Just what the typical Whole Foods home delivery patron needs, about a dozen reusable bags delivered to them every week

- People started stealing hand held shopping baskets

It really doesn't bode well for the political process that politicians can force these ham fisted reactionary laws at a considerably cost to nearly all denizens for absolutely no purpose.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/new-jersey-bans-paper-ba...

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/an-update-on-new-jerseys...

I am basically the core demographic that this sort of law should appeal to. I try to always bring reusable bags to the store, even though I live in a not-very-green city where half of the cashiers look surprised and confused by such a thing. In general I wish that we were doing far more to conserve the environment. But I think that this is a dumb law. The problem is that the benefit:annoyance ratio is terrible. Plastic bags are bad for environment and using fewer is better, but the benefits of a blanket ban will be very modest and the annoyance to everyday people is significant.

The unpleasant reality is that political capital is a big factor in getting things done in a democracy, and people should be mindful of how it's spent. Most voters are indifferent or mildly in favor of protecting the environment; they will go along with environmental goals as long as they don't perceive them as harming their quality of life too much. And that's fine. This means that highly visible and inconvenient policies that tinker around the edges are the opposite of what environmentalists should be aiming for. Unfortunately politicians often aren't trying to fix a problem, they want to appear to be fixing a problem, which is how we end up with performative legislation. Which then wraps the issue up in the usual culture war nonsense, opponents dig in, and more meaningful policies get blocked.

Several counties in Maryland (the non "yee-haw" ones that border the Chesapeake) have banned plastic bags.

Styrofoam has been banned statewide for several years.

The amount of plastic and expanded polystyrene foam trash I pull out of the water and off the shore on Bay Cleanup days has fallen so drastically that it is almost unbelievable.

What hasn't fallen is the sky. Or our freedom. Or the ability to clean out litter boxes.

I'm a watershed steward and meetings and networking events I have found that my experience has been shared with almost every other steward I've talked to. Even those who look after waterways outside of the bag ban area have benefitted because most of the population lies within a bag ban area.

If single-use plastic bottles were banned there would be practically no plastic debris in the Bay.

As I understand it, research done on communities that have banned plastic shopping bags found that overall plastic bag consumption didn't change appreciably. People were in the habit of reusing such bags as garbage bags and whatnot, and when they were banned, they bought other plastic bags to serve that purpose.

My own experiences mirror this. Small sample size, but no one I know just throws away a plastic shopping bag after groceries are carried in; they always get reused.

I have used fewer bags since these bans have gone into effect.

I think people don't remember what life was like before these bans.

I remember traveling from california to a state without a ban, and buying a few things at walmart. I came out with all my stuff in probably 10 plastic bags. It was convenient - only a few things per bag. I could carry 5 per hand and loaded everything into the car. But the bags were good for one thing - to throw in the trash. I also recall outside the store there were bags blowing across the parking lot in the wind.

I also recall going to a state where there was no smoking ban in restaurants. I ate at a restaurant and went home. The next morning I could smell the stale cigarette smoke permeating my clothes from the previous day.

I’m in NYC where we similarly have dumb anti-plastic laws that are more political than actually for the environment.

Oh the straws are paper now? All right, I’m gonna take 5 then because I’ll need to swap it out around every 5 min.

At the grocery store? Everything needs to be double or triple bagged so it doesn’t fall apart. Are that many paper bags (trees) even encmvironmentaly friendly? NYC is a walking city, and I vividly remember someone once walking with a paper grocery bag, and then everything falling out onto the sidewalk as the bag broke during a light drizzle.

Ocean plastic waste is terrible and a good proxy for cultural attitudes to discarding plastics in general and the United States is in the absolute minority of regions in the world regarding plastic pollution.

South East Asia is indisputably the main problem when it comes to harmful practices around plastic waste disposal.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/161rmp9/the_source...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

Given how HN always freaks out about microplastics, I'm surprised that people feel like this is a bad law. Personally, I want a Rwanda-style ban on plastic.

Ontario has had this law for a while now. Its occasionally inconvenient when you drop by the grocery store unplanned and have no bags, but is really a big nothing burger.

Just means we end up with more and more useless shopping bags at our front door, which almost seems worse than single use ones that end up becoming garbage bags for the kitchen. Now we end up buying single use plastic bags for our kitchen and bathroom garbage and end up with more and more reusable plastic bags.

So the single use plastic bags still get used at the same rate, just now I purchase them separately for garbage and we end up with more and more reusable plastic bags, which I'm guessing are worse for the environment.

These laws so far don't seem to be very well thought out.

I have some pretty strong feelings against government bans of these kinds but I had an experience at ALDI, yesterday, that caused me to reflect a little bit on this.

Bear with me (if you wish) for a second ...

I love ALDI -- mine even has the new "self-checkout" which I thought "was the end of ALDI" -- one of my previous reasons I loved the place was their checkers are ridiculously fast and "except for bagging your own crap", getting out the store is fast. But the line at the checkout was long so I did it myself.

You bring your own bags or pay for theirs (with quality bags, most intended for long-term re-use, and I want to say they're $1 or $3, not $5 or $10 like is often the case for worse bags elsewhere but it's been a while). When I started regularly shopping there, I had forgotten mine, enough that I ended up buying a few and always went with the re-usable because they just weren't much more than their (otherwise fine/durable) disposables their large reusable ones seem massive[0]. It's been a while, but I never need more than 4, rarely more than 3 for a whole cart.

Yesterday's trip changed something for me: In self-checkout the big space they give you to set your groceries is sized such that my old bags fit perfectly, all 3, on the tray. Every one of these miserable places is making me self-check, anyway, but they've got the most hassle-free setup (camera-based, doesn't complain every time you things shift -- no weight sensors). But the simplest things make all the difference: I could set three bags next to one another, opened flat ready to receive scanned groceries. Mix in ALDIs ridiculously large barcodes and I've got "Fridge", "Freezer" and "Other" and I'm grabbing an item, whipping it across the "scanner", getting a "ding" 100% of the time and tossing most of the groceries into the appropriate bag. It was the least hassle checking out of a store I've experienced to date and part of why it was so convenient was "the re-usable bags". You already have to bag your crap at ALDI (you can finagle getting your bags setup in the receiving cart when the checker starts but nobody remembers in the chaos of the ALDI check-out experience) and moving your full cart over to "the table", setting your bags and the like is far less convenient (the table, for one, is higher -- the self-checkout bagging area is easier to get bags in/out of).

If every company executed on it like they do, I'd stop complaining about missing the "free plastic tissue things" that I don't know are appropriate to call "bags" any longer given how little they successfully carry. Especially since I could bring in an entire cart of groceries (with the bread and eggs resting gently on top) in three large bags with exactly zero concern that I'd be picking groceries up off of the lawn. As it stands, I can't believe I'll probably use ALDI self-checkout every trip despite my love for how well their checkers rip through a cart full of groceries. They introduce a handful of inconveniences but at a certain point, the problems they "solve with those inconveniences" end up making the experience better with them. For example, I can't think of a time I've gotten a busted up cart at an ALDI, or found an empty cart vestibule in an ALDI store that wasn't so packed I wouldn't want to go inside, anyway. The prices reflect the inconveniences generously enough that you don't spend as much time fussing over cost and just buy the things you want/need.

So while I don't support government bans like this (nor do I support it specifically in this case), if most companies handled "the experience of bringing my crap home" as well as ALDI does, I'd find little reason to complain about it.

[0] My daughter uses one to bring her mid-size (not small by any means) tower PC to and from our home weekly; same one for going on a year, now ... I check it every week when she packs it and the stitching looks great.

This was a very predictable result, correctly predicted by climate activists 10 years ago that were shouted down by the grocer lobbies and the faux greenwashing climate "activists" that accused them of stopping "progress". It was so easy to see:

- meaningless 5 cent bag surcharge that no one would notice other than the initial outrage, and not enough to fund anything meaningful about plastic waste removal at scale

- much heavier plastic bags

- no incentive for consumer behavior to change

Like, what else did they expect other than plastic waste to increase?

I suppose the legislation around here has gone through a couple iterations, but I don't really know.

Decades ago I would make grocery runs on the bus, just carry an empty backpack and perhaps another bag, stuff them tightly full, and any overflow was in disposable bags. Only as much as I could carry.

I also received weird looks and attitudes at certain stores when I'd check out with a duffel bag on the conveyor belt. The checker would grimace and exhibit disdain and a reluctance to even touch the filthy thing? Gee, sorry. It often resulted in "pack my own goods" rather than a bagger willing to do it for me. My appreciation for expert, efficient baggers has grown immensely.

I started picking up reusable totes where I shopped. They're all branded! So I'd feel weird being disloyal and packing the "wrong" tote at a different store. Shame led me to purchase a variety of totes everywhere I shopped... overkill!

And, as others have mentioned, I often shop on a whim and unprepared, so those fancy bags all get left at home, 80% of the time, and I come home with more disposables. The disposables can really add up. You may find yourself hoarding if you think that you can reuse them. I clamped a limit on bag storage, and gleefully discard excess ones.

I took note when my farmer's market switched from disposables, to slightly thicker plastic touted as "reusable" but really just from the same process, and you feel like a villain when discarding them! To their credit, I believe they still have a recycle bin, where you can bring them back.

Now that I use delivery services most of the time, it's simply a one-way deluge. Often the bags are knotted and I just cut into them. Disposables are lower-quality, often with holes or defective handles, never fit for reuse. Yeah, I purchase custom trash bags, because they fit and they hold... garbage... correctly.

I would always store/re-use the thin plastic grocery bags for trashbins, storage bags for miscellaneous things/junk, etc. etc.

Yeah, we probably collected too many over time, and then got fed up and shoved the mass of plastic bags from the drawer into the garbage and into the landfills.

The new plastic ones, I always forget to bring, end up buying 2-3 new ones for $1.25 each - which I'm sure the store has a decent margin on - and then they sit in the house - too "nice" to be used for garbage or any other purposes, so they sit there and eventually get thrown out.

And then you have the previous generation, who moved from paper to plastic to save the environment - whether that was a lobbying campaign from "big oil" to use more plastic, or a well intentioned grassroots movement that grew to make big change.

So now we're back to paper. I wonder if I'll live long enough for a new revolutionary material to come to market and we quickly move to replace the current material. (hemp fiber bags maybe?)