San Francisco, the city that has been at the forefront of a left-wing movement to ban plastic bags for more than a decade, announced this week that residents would no longer be allowed to use reusable bags at the grocery store, because of the threat of transmitting coronavirus.
California voters passed a referendum imposing a statewide plastic bag ban in 2016, after the legislature passed a similar law in 2014. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other California cities have their own bans, and state law allows their bans to supersede the state ban, according to Politico.
Other states followed suit, citing environmental concerns. New York’s statewide ban on plastic bags went into effect on March 1 — in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
But with reports that the coronavirus can survive on a variety of surfaces, reusable bags and mugs have been banned in San Francisco and six counties in the wider San Francisco Bay Area.
Customers will be given plastic bags instead, according to the Washington Times.
The Times notes that New Hampshire, “Illinois, Massachusetts and Maine have imposed similar bans, or in some cases suspended their own state laws encouraging reusable bags.”
It is not the first time the plastic bag ban has been associated with a threat to public health. In 2017, after San Diego banned plastic bags, there was an outbreak of Hepatitis A, which was partly attributed to the fact that homeless people could no longer use plastic bags to dispose of human waste.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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