One Year Later, California Plastic Bag Ban Impact Felt On Beaches

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — New numbers show the impact California's plastic bag ban is having more than a year later across the state.

Voters approved the first statewide ban in the nation in November 2016, and shoppers have no shortage of opinions ranging from not having bags floating around to wondering what savings it brings to the fact the ban itself just isn't a big deal.

Mark Murray with Californians Against Waste helped spearhead the ban.

"We were generating 35 million single-use plastic grocery bags every single day. Those are gone," he said.

Murray says some of the biggest success has been along California's waterways where there was a 70 percent drop in overall plastic bag litter on the state's beaches during the annual coastal cleanup day.

In 2013, the Ocean Conservancy created a separate category for plastic grocery bags instead of lumping all plastic bags together. From 2016 to 2017, after the bag ban went into effect, their data shows an 8.8 percent decrease in plastic grocery bag litter on California beaches.