San Francisco is considering expanding its ban on plastic grocery bags—the first such city ban in the U.S. Big grocery stores and drug stores are already barred from using the bags. Now the city might forbid all retailers of all sizes from using non-recyclable bags (bags for produce or dry cleaning would still be OK), and shoppers would have to pay five cents for each paper bag they use. The California legislature is working on a measure to ban the bags statewide, but San Francisco officials don’t think that measure goes far enough. Retailers haven’t put up much of a fight against the ban, but bag makers are angry, saying paper bags take more energy to make. North Carolina passed a law in June banning single-use plastic bags in the three counties of its Outer Banks region, which is environmentally fragile.
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