How much water are people going to use washing all of those cloth bags, I wonder. They get filthy! Seems like it would be better to come up with a more earth friendly disposable option than to try to figure out where to get water from someday. Pretty much any kind of container we have available to us now is going to end up in a landfill eventually. Nice thought, but not well thought out.

you know, we as a collective planet, are NOT recycling any more. there is no place to put it all and the costs for turning it back into something to reuse are too high. Trash companies are not taking the recycling trucks to a center, they are headed to the dump. Some companies don't even hide it anymore and the trash truck picks up both recycling and trash into the same truck.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/ ... tic-paper/

Waste management experts say the problem with plastic is that it is expensive to collect and sort. There are now thousands of different types of plastic, and none of them can be melted down together. Plastic also degrades after one or two uses. Greenpeace found the more plastic is reused the more toxic it becomes.

New plastic, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to produce. The result is that plastic trash has few markets — a reality the public has not wanted to hear.

Here's the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can't be reused more than once or twice.

All of these problems have existed for decades, no matter what new recycling technology or expensive machinery has been developed. In all that time, less than 10 percent of plastic has ever been recycled. But the public has known little about these difficulties.

?? What tax ?? This fee will hit the poor the most. Someone making $400K won't care if they have to pay an extra 10 cents.

I'm glad there are still a few people like you who have actually thought this out! We keep having these lamebrain ideas put out as "quick fixes" which only make things worse - or at least more expensive. What ever happened to all the research making biodegradable plastics or other materials that can act like a bag at first? If you think about it - if you never saw a plastic bag lying on the ground or in the water but instead they were either recycled or properly put into a landfill - we wouldn't be talking about banning plastics now.
The problem - of course - is careless human beings not properly disposing of trash. We can't tax that stupidity away.

60% of the "fee" (i.e. tax) is going to a governing authority. Any "fees" paid to the government are a tax, regardless of what it is called in the legislation that authorizes the collection of a tax/fee.

I'll know that the effort is serious when all of my purchases are no longer contained in plastic. Nearly every container your food comes in at the grocery store is contained in plastic. Most of the merchandise you purchase comes wrapped in plastic. Nearly every stitch of clothing you purchase contains plastic (nylon, polyester). When these items start being prohibited, I'll know that individuals and governments around the globe are serious about abating plastics. Until then legislation such as this one which levies a tax on each plastic bag, are nothing more, and nothing less, than virtue signaling . . . an effort to make one feel better about ones self that has virtually no actual impact upon life or the environment.

Well said. It's the same with electric cars...made of plastic. We are oblivious the facts of our manufacturing world, picking and choosing efforts to make us feel good. Single use anything outside the medical industry should be avoided IMO, so it's not a bad thing we are working on lessening that trend, the tax is the scam.

Guess I can bring and reuse my chewy boxes...
Free advertising for Chewy..

chessie in a chewy box ♥

Exactly my point. They call it a fee, I call it a tax. Call it what you wish. It's most certainly regressive, hurting the least able to deal with the extra cost the most. It's a small fee/tax to most of us, but it flies in the face of our President's pledge not to raise taxes on those making less than $400 K.

I use my insulated meal delivery boxes. Kinda ironic, huh?

I just thought of something. Are stores also banned from having plastic bags in the produce department? I don't remember with my last quick visit to Safeway. I still prefer to not have my produce put directly on the checkout belt.

They're not close enough to the cash register.