Plastic Bag Bans Backfired in California and New Jersey, Increasing Waste

” the FCR report states that polypropylene bag production has caused a 500 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and that it is unlikely the emissions will be offset significantly by bag reuse, since most consumers throw them away far earlier than expected. “

Recent research has revealed that plastic bag bans in California and New Jersey have resulted in an increase in plastic waste, rather than the decrease intended.

A new report from the California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) shows that California’s 2014 plastic bag ban, SB 270, has led to more plastic waste, not less, over the 10-year period since the law was enacted.

Likewise, a report from Freedonia Custom Research (FCR) found that more plastic containers and bags were used in New Jersey after that state’s plastic bag ban. The FCR report also found the increased use of polypropylene bags as a result of the ban contributed to a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Californians Use More Plastic after Ban

CALPIRG is a consumer advocacy group that supported the initial plastic bag ban and now supports a stricter plastic bag bans in California that removes the “loophole” they claim the existing California law created. The law permits retailers to sell thicker plastic bags for a fee, which CALPIRG said in a January 2024 report led to an increase in plastic waste because customers still treat them as single-use bags.

“While theoretically “reusable,” it appears that many shoppers are disposing of those bags in the same ways as single use bags, potentially undermining the effectiveness of plastic bag bans at reducing plastic waste overall,” CALPIRG reports.

In Alameda County, California, for example, the thicker reusable bags resulted in more plastic waste by weight despite decreasing the number of bags consumed, says the CALPIRG report.

“Since these “reusable” plastic bags are at least four times thicker than typical single-use plastic bags, the estimated 13 million of them sold in Alameda County in 2021 likely surpassed the 37 million single-use plastic bags sold annually pre-ban on a plastic weight basis,” CALPIRG said.

The weight of plastic bags discarded per 1,000 people increased from 4.13 tons in 2004 to 5.89 tons in 2021.

New Jersey Plastic Consumption Spikes

In New Jersey, the results of a 2022 plastic bag ban were similar, according to another, recent report from FCR, a division of MarketResearch.com.

FCR reports that following the thin-film plastic bag ban, the shift to alternatives resulted in a massive increase in plastic consumption.

“[F]ollowing New Jersey’s ban of single-use bags, the shift from plastic film to alternative bags resulted in a nearly 3x increase in plastic consumption for bags,” FCR’s report states. “At the same time, 6x more woven and non-woven polypropylene plastic was consumed to produce the reusable bags sold to consumers as an alternative.”

Despite being advertised as environmentally friendly, the FCR report states that polypropylene bag production has caused a 500 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and that it is unlikely the emissions will be offset significantly by bag reuse, since most consumers throw them away far earlier than expected.

“FCR’s analysis of New Jersey bag demand and trade data for alternative bags finds that, on average, an alternative bag is reused only two to three times before being discarded, falling short of the recommended reuse rates necessary to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions generated during production and [to] address climate change,” said FCR.

‘More Expensive, Worse for the Environment’

There is a reason why thin-film plastic bags are commonly used in the first place, says H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., director of The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, and it is not shocking that people began using other types of plastic bags.

“It is not surprising that the plastic bag bans in New Jersey and California backfired, I predicted as much 10 years ago when I was writing on the then relatively new phenomena of plastic bag bans,” Burnett said. “Plastic bags have many virtues, the primary among them being convenience and ease of reuse.”

As in the case with polypropylene bags detailed in the FCR report, attempting to get rid of plastic bags carries costs, Burnett says, and if cities and states were so concerned about the impact of volumes of plastic waste, they should have looked into other solutions.

“Alternatives to plastic bags are more expensive, worse for the environment, and sometimes bad for public health,” Burnett said. “Recycling plastic bags should have been the response to cities concerned about plastic waste, not banning them.”

Not only are the thicker and reusable bags more costly, but the bans drive stores toward returning to paper bags, Burnett says, and support countries like China which stand to gain economically from spikes in reusable bag manufacturing.

“The cities cost themselves, their residents, and the United States economy money, destroying trees and boosting China, which dominates the reusable bag market, in the process,” Burnett said.

Linnea Lueken ([email protected]) is a research fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.

For more on plastic bag bans, click here and here.

Linnea Lueken https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/linnea-lueken

Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a policy brief ‘Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing’.

Related Topics:#HeartlandDailyNews #LinneaLueken #PlasticBagBans #PlasticGroceryBags

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BREAKING: Globalist Climate Conference Bursts Into Flames

Business

Canada is failing dismally at our climate goals. We’re also ruining our economy.

Published on November 20, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Annika Segelhorst and Elmira Aliakbari

Short-term climate pledges simply chase deadlines, not results

The annual meeting of the United Nations Conference of the Parties, or COP, which is dedicated to implementing international action on climate change, is now underway in Brazil. Like other signatories to the Paris Agreement, Canada is required to provide a progress update on our pledge to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. After decades of massive government spending and heavy-handed regulations aimed at decarbonizing our economy, we’re far from achieving that goal. It’s time for Canada to move past arbitrary short-term goals and deadlines, and instead focus on more effective ways to support climate objectives.

Since signing the Paris Agreement in 2015, the federal government has introduced dozens of measures intended to reduce Canada’s carbon emissions, including more than $150 billion in “green economy” spending, the national carbon tax, the arbitrary cap on emissions imposed exclusively on the oil and gas sector, stronger energy efficiency requirements for buildings and automobiles, electric vehicle mandates, and stricter methane regulations for the oil and gas industry.

Recent estimates show that achieving the federal government’s target will impose significant costs on Canadians, including 164,000 job losses and a reduction in economic output of 6.2 per cent by 2030 (compared to a scenario where we don’t have these measures in place). For Canadian workers, this means losing $6,700 (each, on average) annually by 2030.

Yet even with all these costly measures, Canada will only achieve 57 per cent of its goal for emissions reductions. Several studies have already confirmed that Canada, despite massive green spending and heavy-handed regulations to decarbonize the economy over the past decade, remains off track to meet its 2030 emission reduction target.

And even if Canada somehow met its costly and stringent emission reduction target, the impact on the Earth’s climate would be minimal. Canada accounts for less than 2 per cent of global emissions, and that share is projected to fall as developing countries consume increasing quantities of energy to support rising living standards. In 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), emerging and developing economies are driving 80 per cent of the growth in global energy demand. Further, IEA projects that fossil fuels will remain foundational to the global energy mix for decades, especially in developing economies. This means that even if Canada were to aggressively pursue short-term emission reductions and all the economic costs it would imposes on Canadians, the overall climate results would be negligible.

Rather than focusing on arbitrary deadline-contingent pledges to reduce Canadian emissions, we should shift our focus to think about how we can lower global GHG emissions. A recent study showed that doubling Canada’s production of liquefied natural gas and exporting to Asia to displace an equivalent amount of coal could lower global GHG emissions by about 1.7 per cent or about 630 million tonnes of GHG emissions. For reference, that’s the equivalent to nearly 90 per cent of Canada’s annual GHG emissions. This type of approach reflects Canada’s existing strength as an energy producer and would address the fastest-growing sources of emissions, namely developing countries.

As the 2030 deadline grows closer, even top climate advocates are starting to emphasize a more pragmatic approach to climate action. In a recent memo, Bill Gates warned that unfounded climate pessimism “is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.” Even within the federal ministry of Environment and Climate Change, the tone is shifting. Despite the 2030 emissions goal having been a hallmark of Canadian climate policy in recent years, in a recent interview, Minister Julie Dabrusin declined to affirm that the 2030 targets remain feasible.

Instead of scrambling to satisfy short-term national emissions limits, governments in Canada should prioritize strategies that will reduce global emissions where they’re growing the fastest.

Annika Segelhorst

Junior Economist

Elmira Aliakbari

Director, Natural Resource Studies, Fraser Institute

Artificial Intelligence

Lawsuit Claims Google Secretly Used Gemini AI to Scan Private Gmail and Chat Data

Published on November 19, 2025

Todayville

By Ken Macon

Whether the claims are true or not, privacy in Google’s universe has long been less a right than a nostalgic illusion.

When Google flipped a digital switch in October 2025, few users noticed anything unusual.

Gmail loaded as usual, Chat messages zipped across screens, and Meet calls continued without interruption.

Yet, according to a new class action lawsuit, something significant had changed beneath the surface.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

Plaintiffs claim that Google silently activated its artificial intelligence system, Gemini, across its communication platforms, turning private conversations into raw material for machine analysis.

The lawsuit, filed by Thomas Thele and Melo Porter, describes a scenario that reads like a breach of trust.

It accuses Google of enabling Gemini to “access and exploit the entire recorded history of its users’ private communications, including literally every email and attachment sent and received.”

The filing argues that the company’s conduct “violates its users’ reasonable expectations of privacy.”

Until early October, Gemini’s data processing was supposedly available only to those who opted in.

Then, the plaintiffs claim, Google “turned it on for everyone by default,” allowing the system to mine the contents of emails, attachments, and conversations across Gmail, Chat, and Meet.

The complaint points to a particular line in Google’s settings, “When you turn this setting on, you agree,” as misleading, since the feature “had already been switched on.”

This, according to the filing, represents a deliberate misdirection designed to create the illusion of consent where none existed.

There is a certain irony woven through the outrage. For all the noise about privacy, most users long ago accepted the quiet trade that powers Google’s empire.

They search, share, and store their digital lives inside Google’s ecosystem, knowing the company thrives on data.

The lawsuit may sound shocking, but for many, it simply exposes what has been implicit all along: if you live in Google’s world, privacy has already been priced into the convenience.

Thele warns that Gemini’s access could expose “financial information and records, employment information and records, religious affiliations and activities, political affiliations and activities, medical care and records, the identities of his family, friends, and other contacts, social habits and activities, eating habits, shopping habits, exercise habits, [and] the extent to which he is involved in the activities of his children.”

In other words, the system’s reach, if the allegations prove true, could extend into nearly every aspect of a user’s personal life.

The plaintiffs argue that Gemini’s analytical capabilities allow Google to “cross-reference and conduct unlimited analysis toward unmerited, improper, and monetizable insights” about users’ private relationships and behaviors.

The complaint brands the company’s actions as “deceptive and unethical,” claiming Google “surreptitiously turned on this AI tracking ‘feature’ without informing or obtaining the consent of Plaintiffs and Class Members.” Such conduct, it says, is “highly offensive” and “defies social norms.”

The case invokes a formidable set of statutes, including the California Invasion of Privacy Act, the California Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, the Stored Communications Act, and California’s constitutional right to privacy.

Google is yet to comment on the filing.