California officially banned single-use plastic bags on Sept. 22, correcting a loophole in the original law. California Public Interest Research Group, a statewide student advocacy group that focuses on public interests, engaged in grassroots organizing on the matter for the year prior. UC Santa Barbara students were among the advocates working to get the law passed.

According to California Senate Bill 1053, co-authored by California state senators Catherine Blakespear and Ben Allen, California will no longer offer plastic bags in grocery stores, retail stores with pharmacies, convenience stores, food marts and liquor stores, beginning Jan. 1, 2026. Though California enacted a ban on plastic bags from those stores in 2014, they could legally offer plastic bags if they were sold for 10 cents, were made of thick material and could be considered reusable.

According to Blakespear, after the initial ban, “no one was reusing [plastic bags], and nowhere in California recycles them.”

The ban is a landmark victory for student advocacy group California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG), which has been lobbying and gathering support for the ban for over a year via grassroots petitions and community organizing. 

CALPIRG student organizers at UCSB spoke in front of classrooms, tabled and gathered petition signatures for the issue of rising plastic bag pollution and waste since the beginning of the year. CALPIRG members gained the support of people across the state, doing press conferences and petitions to get the word out, according to UCSB CALPIRG Vice-Chair and third-year political science major Jake Twomey.

“We got key experts on board. We got the science. We have researchers that are part of our organization who work on looking at the actual breakdown of plastics, releasing reports about where that plastic waste is coming from,” Twomey said. “We did a lot of media, we held a lot of press conferences, we talked to key figures across the state and shored up their support and showed the press that it really was a coalition.”

Twomey criticized lobbying by the plastics industry.

“The plastics industry, over time, has run a multi-million dollar campaign to keep these bags on shelves, and I think a lot of that was with their lobbying arm. They spend a lot of money on having their lobbyists walking the halls of power all the time,” Twomey said.

CALPIRG and the senators held a joint press conference in February to promote the bill. They included student organizers and a “plastic bag monster” on stage, which became a figurehead for SB 1053 and was featured with nationwide media coverage on the bill.

“Having the students there with their energy and the signs and the plastic bag monster, all of that made a difference. I feel really grateful that the students cared so much, and for me personally, being at a press conference with people who care about something so deeply makes you feel really good about the bill,” Blakespear said.

While this law represents a victory for California environmentalists, CALPIRG has more work to do, Twomey said. The next step in CALPIRG’s activism is advocating for a ban on all plastic bags in the California retail sector, not just the stores outlined in the bill.

“In 2021, we saw that plastic bag waste totaled 230,000 tons in California. That’s only from (plastic bag waste) and that was a huge increase, even from when the first law was passed. So really cutting down on that, I think, is huge. If we’re banning all bags, we will probably see that number get slashed almost to zero.” 

While student environmental activists face issues of corporate lobbying and legislative pushback, Twomey believes this could be a moment of significant change in environmental politics propelled by student advocacy. 

“I think people recognize that students are often on the forefront of social change historically,” Twomey said. “(When) students are behind an issue, that gives the issue a lot of weight, especially if the students are putting in the organizing work.”

A version of this article appeared on p. 7 of the Oct. 3, 2024 edition of the Daily Nexus.