The plastic-bag industry, unhappy with the law’s requirement that they shift to the manufacture of more durable multi-use bags, moved with a degree of swiftness and efficacy unusual in signature-collection campaigns.

Would-be ballot initiatives often rely on relatively unfocused or underfunded operations. But would-be referenda, as the Sacramento Bee reported, come with a legally mandated 90-day window to collect sufficient signatures. That left bag-ban opponents with just 90 days to rack up over 500,000 valid signatures.

But the American Progressive Bag Alliance, an industry group, launched its signature drive right on the heels of Gov. Jerry Brown’s own signature — of Senate Bill 270, the final bag-ban bill that landed on his desk in September. Fully prepared for a swift, successful effort, the Alliance got to work. Now, supporters of the referendum say they’ve cleared the 800,000 signature mark, although the final tally has not been officially counted.

An immediate victory

Cold, hard political reality provided much of the impetus behind the signature-gathering campaign. Not only was a hustle essential to landing the referendum on the ballot. Qualifying for ballot placement puts an automatic freeze on the implementation of the law to be challenged. Scheduled to kick in on July 1 of this year, the bag ban will be put on hold until the results of the referendum are certified.

What’s more, however, the time that delay buys manufacturers will result — at minimum — in an extra revenue boost of two years’ worth in single-use bag sales. As the Washington Post observed, the 16-month freeze triggered by ballot qualification “will allow manufacturers to continue producing plastic bags until voters act. Sales of those plastic bags could amount to $145 million,” according to Californians Against Waste, a pro-ban group that announced its estimate.

It’s a number that adds some perspective to the big industry outlay of over $3 million in signature collection.

An unfree market

The bag industry has not been alone in throwing its weight around over the dollars and cents on the line when Sacramento Democrats determined they wanted to take California’s many municipal bag bans statewide.

Backroom negotiations cobbled together enough support in Sacramento to outlaw the bags last year. Then the coalition of environmental, political and labor interests behind the ban fell apart at the last minute — only to be resurrected after further wrangling.

The result was a failed vote to ban single-use bags, followed swiftly by a do-over that succeeded in placing the ban on the books. What made the difference? Concessions to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which scuttled the first vote by turning against SB270 when it became clear a minimum 10-cent surcharge on bags would be part of the deal.

After cutting a deal with the Safeway grocery chain, dispelling union fears the surcharge would flow into executives’ pockets, not its own, the UFCW switched back to supporting SB270. The bill passed.

Tough sledding

Despite the unglamorous machinations that played out only partially behind the scenes, California’s bag bans — both at the state and local level — have managed to maintain a significant base of public support.

Already, as the Post reported, about a third of the state’s population is within local jurisdictions that have done away with single-use bags. Much of that comes from the ban by the city of Los Angeles that went into effect on July 1 last year.

Add to that Californians outside those areas agitating for a ban, and residents who don’t have an objection to the law, and referendum supporters face a challenging electoral landscape in 2016.

Though there is still plenty of time to shift public opinion, a USC Dornsife poll showed Californians still backing the ban by a 2-to-1 margin.

At first, I remembered to keep and bring older paper bags. After a while, I thought that too tedious — just another annoyance government imposes on me. I need about one bag a day, so just asking for paper bags costs me about $36.50 a year. For a family of five, that would be $182.50 a year — a substantial sum for the poor and middle class.

The bill also mandates — excuse the governmentese, this is how they write and think:

“a reusable grocery bag sold by certain stores to a customer at the point of sale to be made by a certified reusable grocery bag producer and to meet specified requirements with regard to the bag’s durability, material, labeling, heavy metal content, and, with regard to reusable grocery bags made from plastic film on and after January 1, 2016, recycled material content.”

“Certified” means certified by a government bureaucrat. So it’s more employment for government employees and their unions — at our expense.

Novovirus

In Huntington Beach, I have to put up with shoppers ahead of in the checkout line fumbling to get their reusable bags ready, delaying the line and wasting my time. And ZDNet reported:

Recently, the Oregon Public Health Division released the information that an entire girl’s soccer team was infected with an outbreak of norovirus, a foodborne illness that causes severe symptoms including projectile vomiting and diarrhea. The source: a reusable grocery bag that they passed around and ate cookies from….

The Journal of Infectious Diseases says this represents the first verified occasion in which the virus was transported by an inanimate object, and that, “this also illustrates one of the less obvious hazards of reusable grocery bags.”

Dr. Charles Gerba, a professor in the Departments of Soil, Water and Environmental Science at the University of Arizona who conducts research about the transmission of pathogens through the environment, issued the following statement:

“The latest outbreak of norovirus reinforces the research we have conducted about the propensity of reusable grocery bags to act as hosts for dangerous foodborne bacteria and viruses. In reality, reusable bags are likely at fault much more often than we realize: cases often go unreported and uninvestigated.

“The cause of roughly 70 percent of foodborne illness cases, the norovirus spreads very easily and symptoms include projectile vomiting and severe diarrhea. It can have such sweeping consequences as school and emergency room closures. This incident should serve as a warning bell: permitting shoppers to bring unwashed reusable bags into grocery and retail stores not only poses a health risk to baggers but also to the next shoppers in the checkout line.”

Once again, government’s main function is to make our lives more miserable.

Sounds like another great reason to buy as much as possible online — preferably from another state.

Toxicity

And what about those evil plastic bags? Isn’t it worth risking getting hit with projectile vomiting to clean up the environment? After Los Angeles banned plastic bags in 2012, James Agresti of the Reason Foundation wrote:

In 2011, the United Kingdom’s Environment Agency released a study that evaluated nine categories of environmental impacts caused by different types of supermarket bags. The study found that paper bags have a worse effect on the environment than plastic bags in all nine impact categories, which include global warming potential, abiotic depletion, acidification, eutrophication, human toxicity, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity, marine aquatic ecotoxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and photochemical oxidation.

Furthermore, the study found that the average supermarket shopper would have to reuse the same cotton tote from 94 up to 1,899 times before it had less environmental impact than the disposable plastic bags needed to carry the same amount of groceries. This wide-varying amount of reuse that is required until the breakeven point is reached depends upon the type of environmental impact, but the median is 314 times, and it is more 179 times for all but one of the 9 impact categories.

For example, a shopper would need to reuse the same cotton tote 350 times before it caused less fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity than all of the plastic bags that it would replace over this period. Given the improbability that the same cotton tote would last that long (its expected life is 52 reuses), in most cases plastic bags will have less environmental impact.

So SB270 will make you sick and the environment more polluted. Typical California politics.