CA looking to ba ALL plastic bags

This is so obvious it's laughable. When the original bag ban took place myself and literally every person I know saw the new, thicker bags and said "Oh yeah, THAT makes sense!" The only thing that changed is that we pay for what we used to get for free.

We still have the thin plastic bags here for no charge. When I get a grocery pickup, they use the thicker bags. They are nice to use, but I only need a few. I’ve actually gone into the store vs using the pickup service because I don’t want more of the thicker bags. I do reuse the thin bags on a daily basis for pet waste.

When we lived in Belgium, you either brought your own bags or bought a reusable bag. A lot of people would just bring their cart to the car and load bags from there. It wasn’t a big deal and I just bought bags for pet waste instead of using grocery bags.

Our biggest use of plastic bags is pet waste and I don’t know how to get away from it. We just don’t have a woodsy area or a large enough yard to let it decompose naturally, so it has to go into our trash.

Compostable poop bags are pretty widely available. You may actually be using them and not realize it.

I'm curious as to what the newer thicker plastic bags are like. I know Aldi sells some plastic bags that are heavier than your usual grocery bag, but still not very reusable in my opinion because the plastic develops holes or stretched out areas very easily. Sure, you could use them a few times, but I like a reusable bag to last a lot longer than that.

We've been using our own reusable bags for ages. We love a certain type that Wegmans ( a regional store) sells (polypropylene bag with fabric handles) and we own several of them. Then we have about 4 cold bags from Aldi. Those have a more limited life span, as the handles eventually break, but even so, they last us a few years each at least. The Wegman bags, though, last us a decade or more per bag.

Now Wegmans recently came out with lightweight fabric bags, that, in my opinion are far less useful, because carrying heavy things in them is impossible. I mean, I suppose you could use both the original ones and these, and only put light things in the new ones, but they don't stand open on their own, either, which I also don't like.

I do have them and use them when I run out of the thin grocery store bags and when we are out on a walk. But even the compostable ones don’t really degrade in a landfill. When I was a Girl Scout leader, we had someone from the landfill come and talk to the girls. They explained that the lack of oxygen in a landfill keeps even paper from breaking down. 

I do compost and recycle, so hopefully I’m breaking even in that part of my carbon footprint. 

Okay call me a little confused..

There is the traditional bags that we all got for free to pack our groceries in. Walmart/Target/etc. Thin plastic bags. Poop bags. usually use only once. Target was a better bag than Walmart but the 'same'.
Then there is the paper bag. Pretty self explanatory.
Then for around .99 cents you can buy the reusable bags that last for a long time. I honestly don't think I have ever had to trash one of those. I have a car full of them.
Fancy box type reusable kind.. have handles but pretty sturdy.

Then what is the "but shoppers at checkout can purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that purportedly makes them reusable and recyclable." (are they talking about the .99 or so kind of bags?) The article says people are not reusing them? I'm not understanding? Are they throwing them away? I have probably 20 of them or so stashed in my truck that I reuse all the time... My downfall is that I forget them. So I'll either buy another one or lately I just put my stuff in the cart and load into my bags at the vehicle. I actually do this more often now since this year there are no bags to be found at the checkouts at all, even paper.

I miss my poop bags though. I can't use those disposal kind, they are too small for my huge dog. I don't have a compost thing or woods to throw it out. But I have become creative.. I now save all my dog food bags to put poo in or anything that can contain the poo. If I can remotely save anything to put poo in I hoard it. lol

I don't pay for the "new" thicker bags.  Now, I just take my cart full of groceries or whatever I buy out to the car to bag them up in heavy duty bags I keep in my trunk.  

In my opinion, the old thin bags were not "single use" since I would re-use them for trash can liners, dog poop and as bags in general.  But now since the bag ban, I am buying small, medium and kitchen size plastic trash bags for bathroom trash, dog poop, regular kitchen trash, etc. which are single use.

We reuse grocery bags all the time, especially the slightly nicer ones- Target bags used to be the gold standard, but even those are thinner and not as good- still good for several uses though.

No plastic here except for fresh meats. However I get WM grocery delivery. Larger reusable bags, which often only have two or three items in each. Thankfully generally fridge stuff is in one. Four boxes of crackers in another. The other 5 had 3 items each, no fresh meat. I reuse some, but the rest sit or I share with neighbors. I bought bags for garbage and trash. I do not have an outside can to hold garbage, it must be taken to dumpsters well past my building. If I still had a kitty, that would be a bigger issue.

BTW: not practical to request WM, or other delivery, to come to my unit to get bags to go back out to get my stuff to pack it into my bags to deliver it.

When this first started a driver brought my groceries in used bags. As I unpacked my groceries, I discovered the bags were not clean. Not gross, but disconcerting to me.

Plastic bags need to be banned but it's illegal in our state for any local jurisdiction to ban plastic or polystyrene. Makes me crazy! We see them in the water at the beach and in the waterways and marine animals die from ingesting them but our legislators have made it impossible to ban plastic.

I get so annoyed when I go to a store and see someone put one small item, like a candy bar or a greeting card, in a plastic bag. You can't carry it out of the store in your hand?

We use the thinner plastic bags for lining trash cans- bathrooms, home office/craft room, bedrooms. But the thicker plastic ones are not stretchy enough to fit well in our trash cans, so we end up recycling them or throwing them away. (Our recycling is only picked up every other week, and fills up so quickly!) We mostly do curbside pickup or delivery for groceries now, and they always use the thicker bags. But when you go in store, they give us the thinner bags. Weird!

Sometimes I get a bag so I can use it as a car trash bag on a long road trip, so it is getting reused.