California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the state's updated plastic bag ban Sept. 22, rejecting calls for a veto from the bag industry and approving a law that will only allow paper bags to be sold at retail checkouts.
The plastics industry said Newsom's action, announced as part of a Sept. 22 legislative update, will gut the manufacturing of recycled content plastic retail bags that were allowed under California's 2014 bag ban.
After the Legislature passed the new ban by wide margins in late August, bag industry officials had urged Newsom to veto the legislation, known as Senate Bill 1053.
They wanted the state, instead, to allow bags be part of California's new extended producer responsibility system for packaging. That law, called SB 54, would require bags to have a 65 percent recycling rate by 2032, well above the current 10 percent rate estimated by a state legislative analysis.
The American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance predicted that the law would result in "widespread use of imported non-recyclable plastic-cloth bags, which have essentially become the new single-use bags."
"It's unfortunate that the governor did not consider the true, devastating impacts this bill will have on California's recycling industry, jobs, and the environment. What's more, these job losses in California will reverberate into the Midwest and other states, decimating recycling infrastructure, with this short-sighted public policy," ARPBA Director Erin Hass said in a statement to Plastics News.
The law takes effect Jan. 1, 2026.
Environmental groups welcomed Newsom signing the legislation.
"The new ban on single-use plastic bags at grocery store checkouts solidifies California as a leader in tackling the global plastic pollution crisis," Christy Leavitt, plastics campaign director for Oceana, in a Sept. 22 statement. "Plastic bags are one of the deadliest types of plastic to ocean wildlife. With an ocean-based economy valued at $45 billion annually, California is dependent on a clean coast."
As part of their effort to urge Newsom to veto the legislation, plastics industry groups like the Responsible Recycling Alliance had released a poll in September saying that 50 percent of Hispanic and African American state residents they surveyed wanted Newsom to block the bill.
Industry groups said the new ban would undercut investments in recycling and using recycled content made since the 2014 ban, and said that paper bags have a higher carbon footprint than plastic.
But environmental groups said the plastic bag industry failed to build effective recycling systems for their products, and pointed to their polling that more than 90 percent of California residents were concerned about single-use plastic like grocery bags and bottles.
"Today the experience and data are clear: those plastic bags are not being regularly reused — they are not even getting recycled," said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. "The experiment failed. It's time to end it."