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As of Wednesday, cashiers at the store will no longer be bagging bottles for them, though they might supply empty boxes when available. All New Jersey retail, grocery, and pharmacy stores, along with restaurants and other food service businesses, are banned from giving out single-use plastic bags, as well as foam containers, though there are some exceptions. What about switching to paper bags? Supermarkets can no longer provide those either. “We have long-term customers that still probably don’t know there is going to a be a bag ban,” Millington said. “So we’re trying to educate everybody as they come in....

Key California legislators have reached an agreement that could lead to a statewide ban on carry-out plastic bags at supermarkets, liquor stores and pharmacies by 2016, officials said Thursday.

Think you’re green? Not unless you ban or tax the common plastic bag that consumers use every day to carry their groceries, among other things. From California to Rhode Island, municipalities are considering – or have enacted – plastic bag bans or fees on consumers at the register when making a purchase. Reasons given for such restrictions to consumer choice are plenty, but the most common is that plastic bags are not recyclable (patently false), they take an excessive amount of natural resources and energy to manufacture (not true compared to alternatives) and they are the main culprit contributing to...

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed legislation imposing the nation's first statewide ban on single-use plastic bags. Plastic bags will be phased out of large grocery stores starting next year and convenience stores and pharmacies in 2016. The legislation is meant to encourage consumers to bring their own bags and as a way to reduce litter.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed the nation's first statewide ban on single-use plastic bags at grocery and convenience stores, driven to action by pollution in streets and waterways. A national coalition of plastic bag manufacturers immediately said it would seek a voter referendum to repeal the law, which is scheduled to take effect in July 2015.

California made history late last month in a manner that only its legislature could. ... the state became the first in the nation to outlaw plastic bags statewide. In both environmental and fiscal measures, bag bans are unqualified failures. This ban will engender no positive outcomes for our environment and in turn only toughen the job climate. And yet it gets even worse ... Here, greedy special interests and desperate legislators struck an agreement to allow grocers to retain all the paper bag fees in return for their support of the legislation. Projected to earn as much as $1 billion...

In an effort to protect the environment, Austin,Texas passed an ordinance banning single-use plastic bags in 2013. However, a recent review concludes that AustinÂ’s bag ban has backfired, creating more negative effects on the environment than the plastic bags it outlawed. [Â…] Two years after the bag ban was implemented, the city asked the Austin Resource Recovery group to investigate its effectiveness. Their June 10 report, written by Aaron Waters, states that while the ban was successful in lowering the amount of single-use plastic bags made from high-density polyethylene in city landfills, it was actually worse for the environment overall....

Texas State Rep. Drew Springer embraces freedom. Even for plastic bags. The Republican from Muenster recently filed "The Shopping Bag Freedom Act," a bill intended to block plastic-bag bans in Austin and other Texas cities. Such bans are designed to push customers into buying reusable bags at the checkout stand or bringing some to the store. Supporters praise the bans as a boost for the environment. Critics deride them as unwarranted government intrusion that could increase costs for consumers. "At a time of economic recession and with food prices at an all-time high, this hidden social tax on the poor...

San Francisco passed America's first ban on plastic bags in chain groceries and drugstores in 2007. In a research paper for the Institute for Law and Economics, law professors Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright crunched state and federal data on emergency room admissions and food-borne illness deaths and figured that the San Francisco ban "led to an increase in infections immediately upon implementation." They found a 46 percent rise in food-borne illness deaths. The bottom line: "Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths." So is San Francisco's bag ban a killer? Conceivably,...

A study from the Hong Kong plastics industry says that contrary to expectations, the city’s bag tax has increased the amount of plastic used in bags by more than 25 percent, prompting industry officials to question the 2-year-old law’s environmental benefits. The study found that use of the plastic bags targeted by the law -- the T-shirt and die-cut bags commonly used at supermarkets and retailers -- did drop substantially, as the law envisioned. But it said the skyrocketing use of heavier garbage bags and reusable non-woven plastic bags as alternatives more than made up for that decrease, pushing overall...

By Wiley Smith; July 24, 2008 Just saw that Los Angeles banned plastic bags and will charge 25 cents for each paper bag the store supplies to customers. Three percent of the bag fee will be returned to the retailer (0.045 cents), 3 percent (0.045 cents) will go to the state, and the rest (0.16 cents) will go back to the city to fund an education campaign. Of course, some enterprising individuals likely will be selling the bags for less, buying them at a landed cost of 0.05 cents and doubling their money for a sell price of 0.10 cents...