By Mary O’KEEFE

California has banned plastic grocery bags with the signing of a new law that will go into effect in January 2026. This measure bans all plastic shopping bags. I know what you’re thinking; we already banned plastics bags, which is why we started paying 10 cents for each bag we needed when we were at the grocery store. So here is the explanation on why we all pay for those thick plastic bags, according to California Against Waste: “Single use plastic grocery bags were never really free. Grocers rolled the cost they paid per plastic bag into the price of groceries, meaning that even people who bring their bags to the store were supplementing the cost of other shoppers’ plastic bags.”

Okay – using this logic of paying 10 cents per bag the price of groceries should have gone down, right? Hmm, not that I’ve seen. So we are helping to supplement the cost that grocers pay for thicker plastic bags and paper bags. Aren’t we wonderful?

The new law bans all plastic bags, so not even the thick ones that cost us 10 cents will be allowed. Why is this? Well, it is our fault again. We are not recycling or reusing the plastic bags. And yes that really is on us. I cannot count the times I have walked into the grocery store and left my reusable bags in the car. Often I would just pile the groceries into the cart and bag them in my car, but there have been times when I have paid the 10 cents per bag and got the plastic bags. And lately I have been getting those thicker plastic bags because I need them to put my food waste in to place into the yard bin; I don’t know what I am supposed to do with the food waste in 2026 but I guess I will worry about that next year.

According to a state study, the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed per person grew from eight pounds per year in 2004 to 11 pounds in 2021. Honestly, that waste is shameful and we do need to do something. Obviously paying for the plastic bags is just something we all got used to but now we won’t have any other choice but to use reusable bags.

When the original ban was passed in 2014, and voters approved it in 2016, it was thought we would be helping the planet by getting rid of at least some of the plastic; however, that wasn’t the case. This new ban is supposed to take care of that and it is something that has worked in other states.

There are some consequences from the ban that have been reported by the National Library of Medicine/National Center for Biotechnology Information. Examples include job losses resulting from disinvestments in the plastic industry, health and hygiene problems resulting form the increased use of unwashed reusable shopping bags and the profiteering by retailers and entrepreneurs through the sale of bags with unsubstantiated environmental claims tended to also escalate with PPBs.

(PBBs stand for polybrominated biphenyls – chemicals that were added to plastics used in a variety of consumer products to make them difficult to burn.)

These consequences seem a little bit of a stretch. While yes the plastic bag manufacturers will see a drop in demand but it also allows the plastic company the opportunity to become sustainable and make reusable bags that don’t hurt the climate/environment and add microplastics to our human bodies. So this law is actually giving them the opportunity to make amends to the Earth. As for the unwashed shopping bags – well I guess we can just wash them.

The real issues are what plastics do to our environment, our wildlife, sea life and our own health.

“Every year, around 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide … So many that over one million bags are being used every minute … Every man, woman and child on our planet uses 83 plastic bags every year. That’s one bag per person every four and a half days. Of those 500 billion bags, 100 billion are consumed in the United States alone,” according to the Dept. of Public Works LA County.

“Plastic waste kills up to a million seabirds a year. As with sea turtles, when seabirds ingest plastic it takes up room in their stomachs, sometimes causing starvation. Many seabirds are found dead with their stomach full of this waste,” according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.

On any trip to the beach you can find plastic bags on the sand. Look into the ocean and you will more than likely see plastic bags in the water; however, plastic bags also affect land animals. The stomachs of land animal have also been found full of plastic bags just like sea life.

And remember: plastics, including plastic bags, break down to microplastics, which are small plastic pieces less than five millimeters long.

As the World Health Organization underscored in a 2022 report, current technologies don’t yet enable researchers to quantify population-level microplastics exposures or gauge what proportion of those particles stay in our bodies. However, microplastics’ ubiquity in the environment, combined with preliminary findings from human cell and animal studies over the past decade, have led to urgent calls for more research and regulation.

“There are so many unknowns,” said Bernardo Lemos, an adjunct professor of environmental epigenetics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, “but we are seeing more data that suggest microplastics affect human biology. Understanding what these particles might do to our genes, cells and organs is of increasing importance as changing weather patterns sweep microplastics into more of Earth’s lands, waters and air,” according to Harvard Medicine, “Microplastics Everywhere,” spring 2023.

Even though this law to ban plastic bags does not take effect until 2026, we should all start keeping sustainably produced reusable bags in our cars, and actually use them when we go grocery shopping … or doing any shopping. If we start trying to remember to keep them with us, it will be second nature by the time we have to use them.

We should be seeing temperatures in the mid-to-low 80s through the weekend and then some warm-ups in the 90s for Monday through Wednesday.

The June Gloom is continuing in September across Southern California as a trough (an elongated area of relatively low pressure extending from the center of a region of low pressure) remains along the West Coast and the onshore flow increases, according to NOAA.