Plastic grocery bags are a good thing. I save them and use them for other things.
I buy them by the thousand for under $20. I’m sure that this will become a smuggling crime in California once the bag ban comes into effect this summer. Meanwhile, I’ve been stockpiling. Figure I could make a nice small business out of selling bags in the parking lot.
Up until this point, I’ve had great luck in educating businesses as to their responsibility to oppose interventions into relationships with customers by local government. I’ve only once had to walk out of a store with my purchase refunded when they refused to bag it without my paying fees for each bag.
With the state ban, it will be that much harder to fight at the local business level.
Austin banned plastic shopping bags, largely by the redefinition of ‘litter’ as ‘pollution.’
So now, if I stop at an Austin grocery I’ll only pick up the one or two items I need immediately and do the rest of my shopping out of town. It saves on the city sales tax too.
Absolutely-those plastic grocery bags are recycled as trash can liners, used for cleaning the cats’ litter boxes, and corralling small tools and such on jobsites-paper bags get soggy, tear and break and those cloth ones are germ carriers when used for groceries-but I guess the banning of something practical you can recycle just makes some people happy...
We save and reuse our plastic bags too. When we get too many stored up, we pile them into plastic bags and drop them off in the recycle bins Walmart supplies in the store.