i just pay the extra .60 to .80 per weekly trip

if they went to .25 per bag i would have had to resort to buy a supply of the white plastic bags to use as my personal bags. They cost very little on amazon for something like 1000 count boxes.

Why haven't we banned the vegetable plastic bags?

Since when is the local govt. in the bag business? Just another thing they want to tax to death? Govt. needs to stay out of any and all business, IE golf course? Have they stopped the sprinklers there yet?

I have participated in the annual Coastal Cleanup day by hauling trash out of Stevens Creek creek bed for over 10 years. In the past, a large part of what I found was discarded plastic bags (the type that are now banned). the last time I participated, there were very few of this type of bag to be found. The ban is working. Since Mr Neal and Mr Inks don't think it was a problem to begin with, I have to wonder if either of them ever spent time cleaning out the creek?

@Hmm: You need to take high school civics again. And this time, you need to actually pay attention to what is being said.

@Bob: Don't expect Inks and Neal to ever get it. They don't have the necessities for that.

Bob, I can guarantee that any plastic bags I have ever ended up in a Creek. However, I often follow garbage trucks that seem to have a steady stream of light stuff flying out the back of them - I suspect that more bags and litter end up on highway as a result of this rather than from careless residents.

I tend to take my bags with me for groceries and other small shopping trips. However, when buying expensive clothes, I balk at the idea of having to pay 10c for a bag to carry my $100+ item of clothing. Many stores at least now offer the hanger so you can carry the item to the car on the hanger rather than squash it into a dirty bag that has been used for carrying groceries or asking if I want to buy a bag for 10c.

I see many grocery store "baggers" now wearing plastic gloves so that they don't have to touch the grubby bags customers provide and expect to have their groceries bagged in. It might be interesting to see just how clean some of these reusable bags are when brought into stores, and also to see if we are spreading disease by this habit. I personally use produce bags for all my meat and fish items to help cross contamination from one shopping trip to the next, and yes I have put them in the washer and they have disintegrated after a few washes.

Thank you MV city council for taking away the bags I used for wet trash in the kitchen. You know...those recycle bags I used to get at the grocery store.

Now I buy brand new, never recycled, never to be used again trash bags to replace the recycled bags I used to use.

Good work geniuses.

sparty…..you made me laugh….you are so right. exactly what is happening at my house….and all my friends...

The only reason for the increase, was so the county officials could fill their coffers. I agree that plastic, of all types needs to stay out of the ocean . But I totally disagree with the way the politicians have used "Zero Waste" initiatives to fleece us out of our tax dollars. This is a prime example of our Recycle and Waste Reduction Commission of Santa Clara trying to conjure up ways to fleece the general public, in the name of saving the planet. At least the city council was smart enough to vote it down.

I have never felt the need to buy new plastic bags (except for the garbage can) for the kitchen. When I am prepping to cook, I use the produce bags for the scraps. They are just the right size and when I am finished, I tie the bag up and put it in the trash. They are also the perfect size for the small trash cans in the bathrooms.
It has never been a problem for me to bring a cloth bag into the store. I keep several in all the cars. What' the big deal? And you can wash them.....

@ Michele

I suppose you do all this not to pollute the planet, so why hare you polluting my air with your cars? why don't give up on them and walk to your shopping place with your cloth bags? It really sounds hypocrite to me that you're giving lesson on how not to pollute and come out with this : "It has never been a problem for me to bring a cloth bag into the store. I keep several in all the cars. What' the big deal? And you can wash them...."

"Meanwhile, reusable bag use went from 3 percent of shoppers before the ban to a whopping 89 percent after." In other words, grocery stores bag use went from 97 percent to 11 percent, so the stores are saving money by using 86 percent fewer bags AND charging money on the 11 percent who still use paper bags. PLUS the stores are charging a lot more for their reusable bags with their advertising on them. What are the stores doing with this money?

Yeah, those evil grocers are banking it $0.10 at a time.

So far, nobody has died from all of those mysterious bacteria infested reusable bags. :)


Great ordinance to have passed in MV!

Glad to learn that a 10 cent fee successfully encourages "Bring your own bag". Our city's BYOB policy can be extended to a BYODB habit, too. Bring your own doggie bag when dining out. Fill a reusable bag with your own food containers. Say "no thank you" to using restaurant resources (carry out bags, and disposable containers. I've been doing this practice for 25 years. That's a lot of bags/containers that I didn't contribute to the landfill.

Congratulations Mtn. View on the reduction of plastic litter. And Michelle, soon one hopes, Food scrap collection will begin so organics can get back to our agricultural lands rather than in landfills creating greenhouse gases. City Council, when will we get a full complete organics recycling program that includes food scraps and weekly green waste collection. And when will you ensure that homeowner associations can also qualify for greenwaste collection?

I use the liners from cereal boxes for my wet trash and have been doing so for many years. This serves the purpose of disposing of these bags and as a container for my trash.

I used to use the plastic bags I got at grocery or other stores for my garbage. Now I have to buy "kitchen" garbage bags which are much larger and much bigger than those I was recycling before the ban. These purchased bags contain at least 6 times as much plastic as my old freebies. It's pretty stupid really - more plastic being used + less recycling. I'd love to see the statistics on whether there's less plastic being produced and sold in the states that have outlawed plastic bags.

Seemingly forgotten in all the discussions about charging fees for paper bags is the simple fact that NO city or municipal government or its agents or minions [e.g., city council(s)] has any legal authority to dictate what a retailer charges for products in a retailer's establishment.

Paper bags are a retailer's property that can be given away for free as has been done since time immemorial or a price can be chosen by the retailer for selling cloth, paper or other bags at the retailer's discretion meaning a smart retailer will revert to free paper bags to increase business at the retailer's establishment which benefits the economy as a whole.

What's next, city councils dictating all product prices on retailers' shelves, dictating retailers' employees' salaries, dictating retailers' choices of product brands and quantities, and more such absurdities?

Last I heard the US Constitution was still the law of the land and I wish some monied and interested party(ies) would begin taking cities to trials to successfully cease the constant reduction of all Amercan's rights which are dwindling rapidly as we move further into the 22nd century.

For anyone that did not like my comments, please keep in mind, that as usual, my comments are presented without any context whatsoever. Rather than go through all that here, if your interested in my full comments IN context, you can view the video here:


Web Link (City Council Video, Jim Neal Comments)

The video above is from the city's own website and contains my UNEDITED comments. You may still disagree with me afterward, but at least you will have a better understanding of my views than what has been presented in the article.

From most of the other comments here though, it seems that most people agree with me and for many of the reasons that I stated.

Jim Neal
Candidate, Mountain View City Council
https://electneal.org (Campaign Website)

The new California plastic bag ban law requires handles for reusable bags, but not for paper bags. That's not a fair-and-balanced approach. Because it's the handles that make paper bags viable, not only for carrying groceries home, but also for secondarily carrying trash in them on the way down to, say a dumpster. Raising paper bag prices to .25 a bag therefore, would be an extreme miscarriage of justice!

Due to repeated violations of our Terms of Use, comments from this poster are automatically removed. Why?

another view:

Web Link

Yes Sparty... Baltimore = Mountain View.

The two main objections is that the merchant would pass along increased costs along to the consumers. Uh, what increased costs? As in most cities that have passed this ordinance, reusable bag usage skyrockets and merchant costs go down less disposable bag less. Does that cost savings get passed along to consumers?? Of course not..it goes toward merchant profitability.

The other is that people will shop in the neighboring communities instead where they don't charge for bags. Mountain View has three adjacent cities: Palo Alto, Los Altos and Sunnyvale. Which of those three cities do not have a plastic bag ordinance??? That's right, not a single one.

I'm pretty sure there are more poor people in Mt View than there are in Baltimore, since we hear about them all the time in Town Square.

And you know, all those apts on Latham... I'm sure everyone living in them is on the lease...

What an ignorant thing to write Mr Sparty. Baltimore has 9x the population of Mountain View, so I'm sure they have more "poor people" than MV does.

You can do basic math but are obtuse to sarcasm?

You guys want to dredge up another old dead issue to debate? How about kicking the dust off the airplane smoking ban, or maybe. All equally past and decided upon as the plastic bag issue. We have moved on, join us.

So every time the government does something, we should all just say "oh well, it's over why bother, right?"

Imagine where that would leave us:

* Slavery would still exist
* Prohibition would still be the law of the land
* There would be no inter-racial or same sex marriage
* Schools would still be segregated
* Houses would still have to have asbestos
* Women would still be treated like property
* Women would not be allowed to vote

This is about the government forcing yet another useless policy on the rest of us. In Venice, they use biodegradeable plastic bags and they are practically surrounded by water, but you won't find any plastic bags in it or dead sea creatures killed by plastic bags.

The truth is, that the law was passed solely for money without regard to the American workers that will lose their jobs. Wanna know why manufacturing jobs are leaving the US? They're not; they're being killed by stupid laws like this.


Jim Neal
Old Mountain View

Actually, Jim Neil, along with small minority people who continue to argue that the bag ban should be overturned, a similar small minority of folks would like to revisit those issues you brought up. They look foolish when they do so, but they do it anyway gosh bless'em. The bag law as well as the laws you mentioned have been decided though, and as I said, the rest of us have moved on.
Looking fwd to your next campaign.

What's wrong with being a minority? I've been Black my whole life and I'm not about to change.


Jim Neal
Old Mountain View

Did someone say that being in "a minority" was wrong? I never read that at all. I read how the behavior of the minority political position can be disruptive to the majority who want to move on. There is a very big difference.

People stuck in the past can rally against women's rights or a ban on smoking in planes or a ban on plastic bags, but the majority of people who agree with these laws have happily moved on. Those who refuse to accept these now established laws can be counter productive by continually distracting things with old, closed issues. It is their choice to do so, but they shouldn't expect anything more than an eye roll in response.

Yes, reading comprehension is important and that is exactly the point I was making with my response. In addition to deliberately misspelling my name, the person responding to my earlier post with completely irrelevant statements. Prohibition was eventually overturned, as was slavery, and the other issues that I mentioned.

The problem is that too many people are afraid to take on bad laws because they have the attitude "It's the law, so it's too late to change it". No one has ever explained to my satisfaction why we can't use biodegradable plastic bags and save American Jobs.


Jim Neal
Old Mountain View

Jim, you assume that people don't want the bag ban just as people didn't want slavery. The fact is, the majority of people WANT the bag ban, and the majority of people WANTED to overturn slavery.
You are fighting against what the majority of voters think is a good law just as the Klan works to overturn laws that the majority likes (like equal rights). You and the 5% of voters in MV who support you are not doing anything constructive. You have stopped arguing publicly to overturn the smoking ban, you can admit defeat here as well. Actually, you don't have to admit it. It is obvious to the majority.

Actually, nobody voted for this and that was exactly my point. Unfortunately, people like you would rather engage in childish insults than pay attention to facts. From the very beginning I have said that I would have preferred a vote, instead of the City using police powers to force their personal preferences upon the rest of us. In my opinion that is not democracy.

Perhaps when there is a Council that forces something on you that you don't want, that there was no demand for, and that no one got a chance to vote for, you'll finally get it. In the mean time, I expect you will continue to make petty insults because you prefer to see American jobs destroyed just so we can all feel good about doing something unnecessary.


Jim Neal
Old Mountain View

The voters elected Council members who enacted the plastic bag ordinance. Petition the newly elected Council to get rid of it.

If they won't do it, consider a recall election if you think this issue is of such paramount importance to a majority of the voters.

If you don't think a recall will work, then draft an initiative for the next election and have the People overturn the ordinance.

Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air, going up the creek without a paddle... you name it!

I like the spirited banter back and forth. It's almost like having that Wo' guy back. Every town needs their characters.