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Mostly sunny. High 81F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph..

Clear to partly cloudy. Low 56F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph.

Mostly sunny. High 81F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph..

Clear to partly cloudy. Low 56F. Winds SSW at 10 to 20 mph.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign to make California more environmentally friendly continues — this time with a plastic bag ban.

Thanks to SB 1046, plastic produce bags will soon be a thing of the past. Newsom signed the bill into law on Sept. 30.

By signing it, California will be the first state in the nation to outlaw produce bags. Single-use checkout bags from pharmacies, supermarkets and convenience stores were banned, in 2016. The ban on produce bags goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2025.

The bags are also referred to as “precheckout bags,” which applies not only to those in the produce department, but also bags used for bakery goods, candy, fish, meat, nuts and grains.

Proponents of SB 1046 say the bags can easily end up in waste streams and can contaminate compost facilities.

“The average working life of a plastic bag is 15 minutes, and over 100 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide each year,” a Californians Against Waste member said in a news report.

Californians Against Waste is an environmental advocacy group that sponsored SB 1046. Sen. Susan Eggman co-authored the bill and said in the news report, that banning plastic bags is a critical step in increasing and cleaning composting streams.

The bill will require all packaging in the state to be compostable or recyclable. It also requires 65% of all single-use plastic packaging to be recycled, by 2032.

While some of Newsom’s other ideas — banning the sale of gasoline-powered vehicles, for example — are extreme, this idea is something we can get behind. If there is another, more environmentally friendly way to transport produce and other goods from grocery stores, then why not use it?

The less plastic that ends up in the trash pile or composting stream, the better.

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