Bonta announced that his office was asking the six major bag manufacturers Novolex, Revolution, Papier-Mettler, Inteplast, Advance Polybag and Metro-Polybag to state that their HDPE bags are recycled in the state.
Meanwhile, at a Smart and Final and Grocery supermarket in Fresno, of the 35 shoppers who used bags, 34 came out with new plastic bags, while only one person used a reusable bag.
Some shoppers bring reusable bags from their homes to stores, although not many, and far fewer are reusing the high-density polyethylene bags they buy in stores. Murray also said that bag prices should rise, from 10 to 25 cents or more, and that the educational aspect of the law should be more strictly enforced: stores should reposition signs that say “don't forget your bags” and that cashiers should remind shoppers of the fees they must pay for bags. The thin plastic bags that used to cover all the garbage cans and sandboxes in California bathrooms were and are made of low-density polyethylene or LDPE.The law faced considerable difficulties, including a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by plastic bag manufacturers. He is the executive director of Plastic Beach, a nonprofit organization that connects small businesses with commercial recycling companies to facilitate the recycling of pallet wrappers and other pre-consumed plastic containers. Fong said that to address the deficiencies in the promise of the ban, it is necessary that “a consortium of committed actors do so, including grocery stores, but also legislators, manufacturers of plastic and paper bags and groups such as Californians Against Waste”. In addition, the thicker plastic bags now sold in grocery stores as recyclable and reusable are difficult to recycle, use twice as much plastic and have to go to special recycling facilities.
Many municipal workers say that plastic bags have to be removed manually from the machinery at regular recycling centers and then end up in a landfill. Each year, more than 30 billion of these single-use plastic takeaway bags were distributed in California. But it's still true that, to comply with state law, HDPE plastic bags must be recyclable in the state of California. He said that if a reform is introduced, he would like it to address all plastic bags from all types of retailers, not just grocery stores.
Bags became a target of the legislation, Murray said, because they exemplified everything related to the proliferation of unnecessary plastic. Of the 46 trackers deployed across the country, four ended up in facilities that claim to recycle plastic bags.
