(Don't know what part of CA you're in.)
Ask google for
"san francisco" tax bags and you'll get today's news stories. Here's one:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/01/25/BUGCJAVPAI1.DTLGetting consumers to cut down on grocery bags is a noble goal, but is charging them 17 cents apiece the best way to achieve it?
Today, the San Francisco Commission on the Environment is expected to adopt a resolution urging the Board of Supervisors to pass an ordinance requiring supermarkets in the city to charge 17 cents for every plastic or paper bag "to reduce the proliferation of unnecessary bags and provide funds to mitigate the negative impacts caused by them."
... The department estimated that it costs the city 7.2 cents per bag to collect and dispose of them and 5.2 cents to clean littered bags off the streets.
It turns out a lot of San Francisco residents are putting plastic grocery bags in their curbside recycling and composting bins, where they don't belong. This contamination of the recycling and compost streams costs Norcal Waste Systems, the privately owned company that has the garbage-collection contract in San Francisco, 2.2 cents per bag.
Landfill costs amount to 2.4 cents per bag.
Seems to me like it's probably the *only* way to go about it. I assume that SF has tried some sort of urging and pleading already. Even that might help a little, if it were done more generally. And of course the immediate costs to a municipality are just a small part of the equation.
Me, I've been taking my bags back since 1971. I recently invested $20 in 20 big blue IKEA bags with handles. I'd been contemplating making myself a set out of those blue tarpaulins. (At that point, I was using cloth bags for all non-grocery shopping, and mainly getting paper grocery store bags, which then held the newspapers put out for recycle. And any plastic bags that were acquired could also be recycled, given that my city then had just about the best paper/plastic/glass/tin recycling program on the continent. Then we had to cut back on costs, and now plastic bags and packaging and yogourt containers are not accepted.) And then there I was at the Ikea checkout, and discovered that once again I had not had an original idea. Big blue tarpaulin bags with "Ikea" cloth handles.
The first grocery store cashier who saw them admired our ingenuity at stealing Ikea bags. But no, the in-store bags are yellow; the for-sale ones are blue.
But still, I get arguments from cashiers. Let me wrap the meat in plastic bags, or you'll get salmonella in your bags. (That one devolved into rather a long squabble, since he just wouldn't give up.) And "I have a bag here, thanks" is something that appears to be on a frequency that cashiers don't hear.
And this is one of those generational things too. All the smug little schoolchildren who want to save the world from their elders' polluting ways ... and seem incapable of buying anything and stuffing it into their omnipresent backpacks without shrouding it in a big chunk of plastic. Not to mention all their throw-away fast food and drink containers, and their horrific consumption levels in general ...
So I say make the bag-wasters pay, and kudos to San Francisco for doing it. Hopefully, anyhow.
If only we could do something about the climate up here, of course, we could reduce our emissions a whole lot more. In my household, the ambient temperature in winter is never over 18C (less than 65F), and that's only in the rooms we're using at the time, we wear slippers and sweaters, and we put blankies on for watching TV. But I doubt that many of our neighbours coast to coast are joining us.
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