Those bag makers are going to be about as needed as a typewriter salesmen were in the late 80s.

Why require stores to charge a fee for paper bags?

I'm waiting for the people to be out to get signatures to repeal this law. Otherwise, Amazon is really going to be getting a lot of business from Californians ordering plastic bags. I've already started stockpiling my supply.

Bring a chair if you're waiting for a grass root repeal campaign.
You're in the minority of the voter's common thought. Rest of states will follow within 5 years.
Dinosaurs go extinct.

@Rhee Medboy: See you out there with our plastic bags, brother. It's going to be like a secret handshake. I'll be wearing a Redskins t-shirt.

Wait...the "American Progressive Bag Alliance" is a thing? I'm just going to call them "Big Bag" as in "Big Pharma". LOL!

In all likelihood, climate change will throw us back to the Middle Ages if not wipe out our species. The fact that there is such opposition to an obvious (and small) step in the right direction should worry us all. We should be looking at how to ban oil wells, coal fired plants, and (someday) gas-powered automobiles. Big Bag may be a joke, but Big Oil and Big Coal have bigger guns.

"In all likelihood, climate change will throw us back to the Middle Ages if not wipe out our species."

You're kidding, right?

I'm all for having the bags back.

These bags were banned in Mountain View 18 months ago. Life has gone on much as before, but I see fewer plastic bags in the gutters and in parks. I would imagine there are also fewer bags making it to the Great Pacific garbage patch (Web Link What's the big problem?

Simple explanation and solution
1 Realize that if PLASTIC was what the problem is, then all plastic bottles should be outlawed. Gatorade bottles for example are thick plastic and my family throws 100s of them away a year. That's just us.
2 Follow the money ALWAYS
3 There is no solution for this that I can come up with. It's politics. Plain and simple.
NOTE: before some of you think I am for harming the sea creatures and the children. I am not. I would love to live in a state that is as clean as you can get it but this is unfair and will cost us and make others richer then Richie Rich was.

right on…juan olive….i agree… and why do they force the stores to charge for a paper bag….i bought $300 worth of groceries yesterday…and the lady in line in front of me…threw done on the counter….filthy dirty duffle like bags..with dirt and cat hair all over them…nonsense…i am now buying plastic bags for my use…whereas before i used to used the bags from the stores and recycle them…oh yes….follow the money...

Martin is so right. Follow his web link if you are unfamiliar with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I was so shocked and heartbroken when I first saw this, still am. All the plastic is a problem, but those bags can fly and float for miles.

I bought a book last weekend at the Monterey Bay Aquarium called "Plastic Free How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too" by Beth Terry. She also blogs at MyPlasticFreeLife.com.

She says to start out slow and replaced things that you can. Also, there are reusable bags that can be washed. Anyway, plastic bags can be the first item you replace. Feel good about what you can do!

Since we've already had this ban for a while with no adverse impact to our lives, my reaction to this threat of a repeal of the statewide ban can be summed up in one word: Meh.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch Lets ban the land use because all the cruse boat continue tossing out their trash into the sea had nothing to do with all this plastics in the ocean? Your barking up the wrong tree folks.

The people opposed to the ban seem very confused as to why it came about. The comments about "Why not ban..." exemplify that in a very clear way.
Luckily,those that did understand things made a good law.
Education about the issue and the reasons may help take the sting out of living in an evolving world that is hard for some to keep up with.

Lightweight washable colorful nylon bags can be purchased at Daiso (Steven's Crk Blvd) for $1.50 each. Fit in any purse/pocket. Have been using them for years with no problem. Make great gifts. Gift yourself and stop complaining.

The bag ban does indeed cut down on bags tumbling around on city streets, but the proponents of the ban were disingenuous in their arguments that these bags contribute to the ocean garbage patches.

I'm familiar with those, having worked on a project related to garbage in the gyres, and they're not made from plastic bags. They're made out of garbage dumped at sea, which is the way most ships get rid of their garbage, and from thoughtless people dumping stuff offshore or in rivers. Contrary to the news, cruise ships don't dump at sea anymore, though they used to. Public opinion has forced them to bring garbage back to shore, but the thousands of freighter ships which bring goods into the US routinely dump. There's not just one garbage patch in the pacific, there are garbage patches in all five major gyres, it's just that the pacific one is the largest. If you were in the middle of one of these things, you wouldn't even know it. The dense plastics sink, and the light ones float, which are churned by the waves and broken down into tiny particles. Now, this is not good, but the photos we see advertised as an example of giant patches of garbage aren't being honest, those garbage patches are near shore or in polluted seas, not in the ocean gyres.

Anyhow, I'd support banning dumping of plastic at sea and the real reasons that we have the garbage patches, but banning plastic bags is mostly a feel good measure to the people who passed it, with the small benefit of reducing wind blown plastic garbage locally.

Don't know how many of you are old enough to remember that we used to ONLY have paper bags and they were free as a customer courtesy.

Then came the environmentalists who wanted plastic bags because the paper ones caused too many trees to be harvested (never mind that, even then, most of those bags were made with the cast off pulp from lumber production). So then we could hardly get paper bags and were essentially forced to use plastics. You had to ASK for paper.

Now the environmentalists are again using social engineering to manipulate the public to their latest issue. Never mind that the use of dirty bags in the grocery store could spread disease to immuno-compromised individuals. You can't make people wash their reusable bags and I doubt many do.

The difference that this ban has made for me is virtually zero as far as what I do in my house. I was using the plastic shopping bags to line my garbage pail. Now I have to buy bags to do that, except that those bags contain about twice as much plastic as the shopping bags did, so I am actually putting MORE plastic into the waste stream now and I have to pay for the bags now.

The difference at the store is that I have to pay for the same paper bags I used to get for free and have used preferentially over the plastic always because the idea of using plastic instead of recyclable paper always seemed stupid. The only difference is now the environmentalists have realized that what we did in the past was better all along but they have found a way to extract money from the public for their causes now.

The environmentalists aren't extracting money with this silly bag fee, since the fee goes to the stores. The best reason for it that I can imagine is that it's a bribe to stores not to fight the plastic bag ban. Paper bags are more expensive than plastic bags, so stores would have objected to the ban. Now, paper bags are a profit stream.

Some environmentalists just want to "do something", anything, to think they're helping the earth.

I've got a few of those reusable bags, and they're junk. They fall apart in the wash, and they get dirty from inevitable drippings from groceries and start to smell. Maybe I shouldn't be washing them in this drought, and just build up an immunity to bacteria that grows in rotten food juice.

Yes Resident. All the reusable bags are all exactly the same. If you bought some and they were junk, they must all be junk. Not a good one in the entire existence of re-usable bags.
Yah.

The best part about the bag ban is that the stress it causes on closed minder, leads to a quicker end game. The 30% is dieing off and will soon be 20%, then 10%, the fringe, then...poof. buy-bye neo-conservativism.
I'll bury their memory in a white plastic shopping bag because I truly could give a rodents hind quarters about this trivial matter. Yes, I said TRIVIAL matter...I think I just heard another one hit the floor.

people forget the whole reason for plastic was to help the enviroment. Like MTBE. Like others now I have to buy more plastic bags--which as mentioned are thicker. Not to mention NOT recycled.

But one thing is good...it keeps plastic bags off the street where sun breaks them down, and in the dump where they probably never will break down