Another city has banned the usage of single-use plastic bags to hold groceries. Several other cities in California, including Santa Monica, San Francisco, Pasadena, and Long Beach have also recently adopted the ban, as has unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County.
The plastic bag ban will hopefully help to reduce waste in landfills and encourage local residents to do their grocery shopping with reusable bags or paper bags. Many individuals across America have already made the personal choice to cease using single-use plastic bags at grocery stores. Most people who choose to avoid the plastic bag at the checkout will bring their own fabric bag in with them, and multiple stores in the country offer reusable bags for sale at their checkout counters.
"Local governments have been charged, I think rightfully so, to reduce the amount of waste we put in the waste system," said Jeffrey Prang, Mayor of West Hollywood. Plastic bags, he said, "are costing us money and filling up landfills."
The West Hollywood ban, instituted Monday, August 20th, will require large retailers (those with buildings of 10,000 or more square feet) to stop using the single-use plastic bags within six months. Stores of a smaller size will have up to a full year to comply with the ordinance, while farmer’s markets, restaurants, and other kinds of food service providers will be excluded from the ban. Approximately 490 of the 900 stores in the area will be affected.
It is worthwhile to note, however, that most stalls at Farmer’s Markets already generally re-use plastic bags when making their sales to customers, as well as promoting the use of a fabric reusable bag. Officials have been quoted as saying that the new plastic bag ban has been met with very little resistance in the places where it has been enforced.