Each of the cities in Santa Clara County, CA, is proposing a new 25-cent tax on nearly every bag now offered free at grocery and retail registers.

Join us in opposing this anti-consumer, anti-business new tax.

View the model ordinance that we are opposing. 

See ACC's letter submitted for April 22 Recycling and Waste Reduction Commission Meeting. More info

This new tax is hard on consumers, bad for the environment and conflicts with state law.

  • California has already put in place a comprehensive, statewide approach to promote plastic bag recycling at large grocery stores and pharmacies.  For the program to function, recycling has to work all across the state with the participation of cities and counties.  The tax being considered by the cities of Santa Clara County undermines the state’s program – in fact, the state law actually prohibits cities from taxing bags to avoid just this sort of destructive effect on the statewide effort.  More info

  • This new bag tax ignores the current crisis in our economy.  The new tax increases costs on families while creating a new government bureaucracy.  More info

  • At-store recycling programs accept far more than their own bags – they accept other plastic bags and product wraps, such as dry cleaning bags, newspaper bags, and wraps from paper towels, napkins and bathroom paper.  These readily accessible at-store recycling programs could evaporate if the cities of Santa Clara approve a tax because stores would be able to stop offering recycling.  More info

  • Plastic makers and recyclers have offered to help the cities of Santa Clara County improve their recycling of plastic bags and wraps.  This would increase recycling and save money for communities.  More info

  • Taxes and bans just don’t work where they’ve been tried.  Communities that taxed or banned the use of plastic grocery bags found that their efforts to help the environment actually had the opposite effect.

    • A tax on grocery bags in Ireland has not reduced plastic bag use.  Consumers today actually use 10 percent more plastic bags than they did in Ireland’s pre-tax days.  More info

    • San Francisco’s ban on plastic grocery bags caused shoppers simply to switch to paper bags.  It’s much harder on the environment to make and ship paper bags – plastic grocery bags actually require 70 percent less energy to manufacture, produce 50 percent less greenhouse gas emissions and create five times less waste than bulky paper bags.  More info

    • San Francisco’s experiment with a ban did not decrease litter, which was one of the stated purposes of the city’s ban.  More info

A broad alliance of consumer and business groups recently formed to oppose this new tax.  More info

Join us to oppose this anti-consumer new tax.

Read about us in the Los Altos Town Crier (01/30/09)

Sponsored by the Progressive Bag Affiliates of the American Chemistry Council.