The plastic bag ban: unnecessary

After much heated debate, Gov. Jerry Brown has assented to signing  the bill banning all plastic bags in California. Once signed, the ban on plastic bags would kick in for grocery stores and pharmacies on July 1, 2015, and extend to convenience stores and liquor stores a year later. In place of plastic bags, stores will offer a paper or reusable bag at the cost of 10 cents.

Personally, I am a strong believer that plastic bags are a small necessity in life. It’s not that I don’t care for the environment or the building trash piles in landfills and in the sea, but I think that there are alternate and possibly better methods to deal with plastic bags than to ban them.

The main concern by people arguing for the bill is that most plastic bags are not recycled and end up cluttering landfills and rivers where they endanger wildlife.

The supporters of the bill claim that plastic bags can only be used once before being disposed, creating the need to produce more and more plastic bags. The people who came up with this have obviously not met my mom. She’s stocked up on hundreds of plastic bags that she reuses for various purposes such as trash bags, grocery bags, and to store things in. I’m sure she’s not alone.

If the plastic bags were banned, stores would begin to charge us for our convenience. Instead of getting a free bag with each purchase, people would have to buy a paper bag at the minimum of 10 cents. Though 10 cents may seem little more than an insignificant to us, to some people, the 10-cent purchases  add up over time.

Though the change is inevitable, there are much better ways to deal with the situation at hand. A plastic bag ban would solve some problems but create new ones such as a loss of jobs for plastic bag manufacturers and a costly replacement.

The government doesn’t have the right to take away over 2000 jobs away and send them overseas to China where reusable bags are produced.  Grocers will also make around six cents per bag they sell compared to the free plastic bags.

Not only will the ban affect shoppers, it will also affect business for grocery stories. A 2012 study from the National Center for Policy Analysis showed that companies that adopted the ban experienced a 3.3 percent drop in sales.

With the cons outweighing the pros, the government should instead reward the people who bring their own reusable bags when they go shopping rather than to remove plastic bags completely. With an incentive to bring their own bags, shoppers will help reduce the plastic bag usage and keep our landfills clean.