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.
That said, this could still reduce my plastic use. The old, thin bags were sufficient. The new, thick bags have been overkill since day one. Given that the frequency with which I take out the trash didn’t change when the thin bags were banned, I’m sure I use quite a bit more plastic than before the ban. Maybe bags sold for small trash cans are thinner, and I’ll go back to pre-ban levels of use.
It looks like lots of people did toss plastic bags, even the thicker ones, away after one use. I wasnt living in CA but the thicker plastic bags were just thicker disposable bags to many people.
It looks like the new, thick bags are 5x thicker than the old, thin ones (0.5 mils vs 2.5 mils) [0]. 11lb is a lot less than 5x 8lb, so the per-person bag trashing must be drastically lowered, unless weight and thickness aren’t correlated.
If everyone was reusing their plastic bags as waste bags... even if people who used plastic bags just threw them away, this wouldn't be an issue at all. The point of this is people don't throw them away, and they tend to end up as litter that ends up in storm drains or in Coastal California, just blow into the ocean.
It makes perfectly good sense to want to ban plastic grocery bags in coastal states and keep them in inland states.
IIRC, the stated purpose at the time was to reduce plastic bags blowing in the wind. But I didn't see a lot of that before the rules, nor do I see much of it in US places that don't have sun a ban. It seems more correlated to general cultural tidiness than to rules around bags. Japan loves plastic bags and I basically don't see any litter anywhere there. But I did see a lot of them out in the environment in Cambodia and Vietnam.
Anyway I much prefer the reusable (fabric) bags. Much stronger, larger, easier to carry.
I have a dog and an infant, so I seem to have an infinite supply of things best disposed of in plastic bags :-)
I would assume throwing at least some of them in the laundry would work well enough, or even just hand washing, but I guess that'll depend on the material itself.
Or do most people also just wear single-use disposable clothing as well? Should we just assume people don't know how to do laundry?
Uncertainty - "how to keep the fabric ones clean?"
Instilling doubt - clearly these reusable shopping bags just aren't as hygienic as the disposable ones. Yet another way to toss out the suggestion that these disposable bag bans aren't good, and we should stick to disposable bags, without directly stating it. Have other people reading these comments have that thought stuck in their mind, "oh yea, reusable bags aren't good, they'll have food contamination."
Unless you really think NBJack honestly never thought about laundering or washing fabrics. C'mon, even my three year old understands when fabrics get dirty they go in the washing machine.
> Unless you really think NBJack honestly never thought about laundering or washing fabrics.
I think that's infinitely more likely than some psych play trying to 'sow FUD' about... plastic bags.