Lawmakers to Charge for Plastic Bag Use

June 5, 2008— -- Plastic bags are so common in our daily lives that we barely give them any notice. Ubiquitous as they are, some California lawmakers believe the bags are a menace and they want to make shoppers pay 25 cents for each one they use to tote their goods home.

The California Assembly recently passed a bill that would give retailers three years to reduce their use of one-time shopping bags, both plastic and paper, by 70 percent. Beginning in 2011, shops that had not met and maintained the reduction requirement would then charge shoppers a quarter per bag.

California already has the only plastic bag recycling program in the country -- in which retailers collect used bags in bins -- and some cities, including San Francisco, Oakland and Malibu, have banned their use outright.

China banned plastic bags in January and Bangladesh has outlawed them since 2002, which might come as a surprise, given that neither country is known for its progressive environmental policies. Ireland has a similar fee-for-bags program, charging around 30 cents each.

Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, a Democrat from Van Nuys who sponsored the bill, told ABC News that reducing the number of plastic bags is good for the environment and the economy.

"Plastic bags are a huge problem, whether people realize it or not. In California, we use 19 billion plastic bags a year. You need 4,000 barrels of oil to produce that many bags," he said.

The lightweight bags take centuries to biodegrade. They end up caught in trees, strewn across beaches and stuck in drain pipes. Though inexpensive to manufacture, dealing with their cleanup costs the state millions of dollars a year, Levine said.

"The state spends $300 million cleaning up bags -- getting them off the beaches and out of the storm drains."

Levine, who also introduced the recycling bin law three years ago, said lawmakers and citizens understand the problems plastic bags pose more now than they did then.

"I introduced the recycling bill three years ago and got a lot of pushback. At that time, only about 2 percent of plastic bags were recycled. Since then we've seen a 100 percent increase in bag recycling, but that means we only recycle 4 percent of all bags. It's either an impressive number, or still leaves much to be desired, depending on how you look at it."