Bag bans at groceries were supposed to decrease plastic waste. So how come it’s increasing?
Shifting tides: Heavyweight reusable shopping bags were supposed to solve a problem. They’ve created a different one. Photo: Chuck Thompson
By Nick Engelfried. January 30, 2025. When Oregon banned retailers and restaurants from giving out plastic, single-use checkout bags in 2019, environmental groups hailed it as a big step forward in the fight against plastic waste.
The ban “makes Oregon a national leader in the fight to protect our environment from plastic pollution,” Charlie Plybon, Oregon policy manager with the Surfrider Foundation, said soon after it cleared the legislature.
Oregon’s statewide plastic bag ban, the third in the country, prohibits stores from offering bags made of thin plastic film to customers at checkout.
Thicker plastic bags that are intended to be reusable can be given out for a minimum of five cents, as can bags made of paper. Customers on food-assistance programs are exempt from the fee.
Because Oregon’s bag law applies to restaurants as well as retail and grocery stores, it was regarded by many as the strongest state plastic bag ban on the books when it went into effect in 2020.
Five years later, organizations holding litter cleanups in Oregon report finding fewer discarded plastic bags, suggesting the ban has helped reduce the number of bags discarded by consumers.
However, not everyone is happy with the results of Oregon’s bag law or similar bans now in force in some other states, including Washington.
Critics include environmental groups who strongly support reducing plastic waste, but say the bans have failed to achieve their full, intended effect because of loopholes that allow businesses to offer thicker “reusable” plastic bags at checkout.
“These thicker bags are marketed as something that can be reused over 100 times,” says Celeste Meiffren-Swango, state director of Environment Oregon. “Unfortunately, few people actually reuse them. The result? They end up as trash and harm our environment just as much as the thinner plastic bags did.”
Because thicker bags contain more plastic, switching over to them actually increases plastic waste if too many consumers simply treat them as disposable. Charging customers for checkout bags was supposed to encourage their reuse, but fees as low as five cents per bag appear to be too small to have had the hoped-for level of impact on shopper behavior.
In California, which passed the country’s first statewide bag ban back in 2014, a similar loophole not only undercut the law’s effectiveness but contributed to producing record amounts of plastic bag waste after the ban went into effect.
It appears the number of bags getting reused wasn’t enough to cancel out the use of additional plastic to make them thicker.
“Even if people do reuse the thicker bags, they typically are only doing so once or twice,” says Meiffren-Swango. “That isn’t enough to justify continuing to offer them.”
In response to criticism of its original plastic bag ban, California passed updated legislation in September that will prohibit stores from offering any plastic bags, including the thicker varieties, at checkout. It goes into effect next year.
This may solve the problem in California. However, since the state passed its first-in-the-nation bag ban over 10 years ago, 11 others have followed suit. Some states have included similar loopholes for reusable plastic bags in their own bans.
It remains to be seen whether or how these existing bag bans can be improved—including in Oregon and Washington, both of which have an opportunity to address the issue during their 2025 legislative sessions, which started earlier this month.
Plastic’s long reach
Plastic waste has become ubiquitous.
According to the UN Environment Programme, the world now produces an estimated 400 million metric tons of plastic waste every year, including up to 5 trillion individual plastic bags.
The problem is getting worse, with one projection claiming that plastic will outweigh fish in the oceans by 2050. (That assertion has recently been challenged by Science.org, the same organization that published it.)
Plastic waste is famously responsible for killing wildlife that accidentally consume it or choke inside bags and containers. Refining and manufacturing plastic from petroleum also makes climate change worse by releasing powerful greenhouse gases.
Film industry: Want 12 bags for 15 items? Here you go. Photo: MTSOfan/Flickr
Then there are the public health impacts of plastic, some of which are only beginning to be understood.
A review of 3,000 studies, conducted by University of California San Francisco researchers, concluded microplastics in the environment may be linked to higher rates of colon cancer, lung cancer and infertility in humans.
All this has made reducing plastic waste a priority for environmental groups, including in Oregon, where a recently introduced bill could make the state one of the first after California to close loopholes in its existing bag ban.
Oregon Senate Bill 551, sponsored by Democrat Janeen Sollman of Hillsboro, would phase out all plastic checkout bags while also restricting the use of other single-use plastic items, such as toiletries offered in hotels.
“Several legislators have already signed on to co-sponsor this important bill, and it’s supported by a large coalition of environmental organizations,” says Meiffren-Swango. “We expect we’ll see even more support as the legislative session gets underway.”
It remains unclear whether Washington will consider changes to its own plastic bag law, which passed in 2020 and is broadly similar to Oregon’s, during the legislative session that began earlier this month.
Partly, this is because Washington’s ban is perceived as having potential to become more effective over time. It includes a provision to gradually increase the required thickness for reusable plastic bags offered at checkout, which is currently set at 2.25 mils and will jump to 4 mils in 2026. [A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the measure of plastic bags in “millimeters” instead of “mils.” A mil is a measurement that equals one-thousandth of an inch. —Editor]
“That’s a very thick bag, making it much more likely people will reuse them because they seem more durable,” says Heather Trim, executive director of Zero Waste Washington.
Washington’s plastic checkout bag fee will also increase from 8 to 12 cents in 2026.
Depression era: When did basic math become a moral issue? Maybe that’s the problem. Image: Mike Licht/Flickr
Another reason the Washington legislature may not consider a full plastic bag ban this year is that groups like Zero Waste Washington have put their resources toward competing priorities, including passing the Recycling Reform Act (formerly known as the WRAP Act), which would improve access to curbside recycling for consumers and require plastic companies to invest in recycling infrastructure.
That bill has long been a focus for Washington environmental groups, who see it as key to the larger goal of cutting plastic waste.
Still, while her organization is now focused on the Recycling Reform Act, Trim says Zero Waste Washington supports the idea of a plastic bag phaseout and would be happy if it gets introduced.
“Our ultimate goal is to not have plastic bags available when you go to checkout, and have people bring their own reusable bags instead, with paper ones available in case you forget,” says Trim.
In the meantime, Zero Waste Washington hopes the increased thickness of bags given out starting next year will encourage consumers to think of them as truly reusable and bring them back to the store again and again.
Of course, because the new bags will be much thicker than those now on offer, even more would have to be reused to prevent the amount of plastic bag waste going into landfills from staying the same—or even increasing.
Improving the bans
It’s easy to portray the legacy of state plastic bag bans as a mitigated failure, but this would be an oversimplification.
A report released last year by Environment America, U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Frontier Group analyzed available data and concluded some state or municipal bag bans have had major positive impacts.
“By and large, plastic bag bans are successful at reducing the use of bags and associated litter,” says Meiffren-Swango, who co-authored the report.
She and the other authors concluded five states and jurisdictions with especially effective bans have reduced plastic bag consumption by a collective 6 billion per year, or “enough bags to circle the earth forty-two times.”
Existing bag laws in New Jersey and Vermont prohibit stores from giving out any plastic bags at checkout, similar to what California’s updated ban will do. Partly as a result, New Jersey has eliminated an estimated 5.51 billion plastic bags per year while Vermont’s has prevented the use of 191 million bags.
There are alternatives: This string bag can carry the same amount as four or five plastic film, grocery bags. Photo: fixlr/Flickr
The plastic industry argues wide-reaching bag bans like those now on the books in New Jersey, Vermont and California are misguided, because the canvas-type reusable bags consumers bring with them to stores may also contain plastic content and are not recyclable.
Plastic film bags, on the other hand, can be recycled.
“As California will eventually learn, replacing thicker but recyclable plastic film bags, like those allowed in Oregon and Washington, will likely lead to the widespread use of imported cloth-like, non-recyclable plastic bags,” Erin Hass of the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, an industry group, told Columbia Insight in an email.
Instead of states banning plastic checkout bags, Hass suggests, “bag fees could be increased to encourage reuse and spur greater investment in collection and recycling programs.”
While it’s possible to recycle film plastic bags, they are not accepted by most curbside recycling programs, and recycling rates are consistently low. The EPA estimates that in 2018, approximately 90% of plastic “bags, sacks and wraps” were not recycled nationwide.
In states with bag bans that include the “reusable” loophole, actual reuse and recycling of plastic checkout bags has not been enough to offset the extra plastic that goes into making thicker bags.
“In California, the amount of plastic discarded in the form of bags, by weight, actually increased in the years after the ban, despite the total number of bags used going down,” says Meiffren-Swango.
When California’s legislature passed its original plastic bag ban in 2014, the amount of plastic thrown out per one thousand people is estimated to have stood at 4.08 tons annually.
In 2021, that number hadn’t just failed to go down—it jumped to 5.89 tons.
Meiffren-Swango hopes other states, including Oregon, will follow California’s lead by attempting to eliminate the reusable loophole.
“We’ve known for a very long time that single-use plastic bags are wasteful,” she said. “They pollute our communities, threaten our health and harm wildlife. Now we look forward to the Oregon legislature taking action to get rid of all plastic bags at checkout, once and for all.”
