California Announces $3.35 Million Settlement with Plastic Bag Manufacturers
By Peteruetz – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikicommons
Press release from the California Attorney General’s Office:
California Attorney General Rob Bonta [late last week] announced settlements totaling $3.35 million with three major plastic bag producers, Novolex Holdings, LLC (Novolex), Inteplast Group Corporation (Interplast), and Mettler Packaging LLC (Mettler), resolving allegations that the companies violated Senate Bill (SB) 270, the Environmental Marketing Claims Act (EMCA), False Advertising Law, and Unfair Competition Law by unlawfully marketing and selling non-recyclable plastic bags in California.
This follows earlier settlements with four other plastic bag producers — Revolution Sustainable Solutions (CA), LLC (Revolution), Metro Poly Corp. (Metro Poly), PreZero US Packaging, LLC (PreZero), and Advance Polybag, Inc. (API) — that were announced in October 2025. Altogether, the seven producers have agreed to pay over $5.1 million in penalties and attorneys’ fees. Effective January 1, 2026, another law (SB 1053, authored by Senator Catherine Blakespear) prohibits retailers from providing plastic bags to consumers at checkout counters, requiring that stores instead offer only recycled paper bags or allow customers to bring their own reusable bags. Six of the producers also agreed to stop selling plastic bags in California in advance of SB 1053’s effective date.
“Plastic bag manufacturers have generated enormous amounts of plastic waste, which pollute California’s environment and harm our communities,” said Attorney General Bonta. “At the California Department of Justice, we are committed to tackling the global plastic pollution crisis and the corporations behind it. Going forward, we will monitor compliance with SB 1053, to ensure that the law’s goals of reducing plastic bag waste are met.”
Single-use plastics, including plastic bags, comprise much of the plastic waste that escapes into the environment. Plastic bags
block waterways, pollute ecosystems, and harm wildlife. Plastic does not biodegrade; instead, it breaks down into smaller pieces called microplastics. Microplastics have been found in drinking water, food, and even the air people breathe. More recently, microplastics have been found inside the human body: in our lungs, blood, and in breast milk. The producers at issue here have provided billions of plastic bags used by California grocery retailers and have certified that these bags meet recyclability requirements as required by SB 270. However, despite the manufacturers’ claims and widespread consumer belief, these plastic bags cannot be recycled to any significant degree and thus are not “recyclable,” let alone “recyclable in this state,” as SB 270 required. The Attorney General is responsible for the enforcement of California’s laws, including SB 270 and the state’s unfair competition, false advertising, and misleading environmental marketing laws.
In November 2022, Attorney General Bonta launched an investigation into producers of plastic bags over concerns that their recyclability claims are misleading. The Attorney General sent demand letters and subsequently issued investigative subpoenas, requiring producers to substantiate their claims that their bags are recyclable, including evidence supporting the producers’ implicit and explicit representations of their bags’ recyclability, such as by placing the chasing arrows symbol on the bags.
The producers were unable to produce any documents with information regarding the quantity of plastic bags that are recycled at the producers’ own facilities; provide any firm evidence that recycling facilities in California recycle plastic bags, including facilities that producers identified as those they believe recycle their bags; or identify the percentage of plastic bags the producers sold to stores in California that were recycled. The producers also affirmed that their plastic bags display the chasing arrows symbol and direct consumers to recycle the bags, which are “claims” subject to the EMCA. Additionally, the investigation included a statewide survey to verify whether waste processing and recycling facilities accept plastic bags for recycling. Out of the 69 facilities surveyed, only two claimed to accept plastic bags, but could not confirm the bags were, in fact, recycled. This survey confirmed that the vast majority of facilities in California do not accept plastic bags or process them for recycling.
Attorney General Bonta obtained settlements in October 2025 with Revolution, Metro Poly, PreZero, and API, who agreed to stop sell plastic bags in California and collectively paid $1,753,000. We concurrently filed a lawsuit against Novolex, Inteplast, and Mettler. As part of the settlements announced today, Novolex will pay $1,650,000, Inteplast will pay $1,000,000, and Mettler will pay $700,000. These settlement amounts bring the total for all seven producers in this matter to $5,103,000, which includes $3,475,000 in civil penalties and $1,628,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs.
n attorneys’ fees and costs.and costs.
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So when are they going to outlaw my trash bags?
Coming soon !
A Californika law was introduced to develop a special detachment of ‘Trash Police’.
They go through your trash and ferret out any er… ‘fineable’ items… and send you a bill !
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Senate Bill 1383 (SB 1383), empowering cities to enforce organic waste recycling (food scraps, yard waste) through fines for contamination, leading to local “trash police” scenarios where workers inspect bins and issue notices, with some cities adopting education over strict penalties for noncompliance
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Next bill will be establishment of the ‘Toilet Police’ that will go through your… _____.
Go figure.
I remember when milk was delivered to your door in glass bottles, with waxed paper caps.I was the runner for the milk driver.
Then came waxed paper milk cartons.They were recycled as fire starters. Then came the plastic coated paper cartoons. What a disappointment!
Now you can buy one Gallon plastic milk jugs wrapped two together with more plastic.
Bonta is right on this one,but I still hate his guts.(Bonta Derangement Syndrome)
You may have ran into my grandfather who was running meat deliveries around the county.
There’s a lot of packaging that goes into packaging that simply is never going to be reused for anything, not even firestarter material.
So you can only take all the products in plastic bags out of the stores using a paper bag?
Or you could use a reusable bag.
Or you could use one of the boxes items were brought to the store in.
Or you could just haul them out to your vehicle in the cart.
But sure, if you choose to use a paper bag, those can be reused or repurposed.
However, plastic bags are not banned in California– they just need to be recyclable.
That seems pretty sensible.
IMHO:
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>”But sure, if you choose to use a paper bag, those can be reused or repurposed.”
Unfortunately, most modern ‘paper’ bags probably won’t even make it out to the car before being torn and unusable. Figure they are designed to spill groceries. I use them for lighting the diesel fires to burn orchard waste. Figure I’m just contributing to the 3 million acres burned each year in Californika.
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>”Or you could use one of the boxes items were brought to the store in.”
Most grocery stores (other than Costco) don’t provide extra cardboard boxes out by the cashiers.
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>”However, plastic bags are not banned in California– they just need to be recyclable”
Newsomites thought they were ‘single use‘ bags.
“A plastic bag has an average lifespan of 12 minutes and then it is discarded, afflicting our environment with toxic microplastics that fester in our oceans and landfills for up to 1,000 years,” Sen. Catherine Blakespear, an author of the new ban, said in a news release issued after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the ban into law on Sunday.
Heh… FESTERING Bags !
WINCO and Target plastic bags lasted a long time. Used them again and again.
Now all gone.
Thanks Blakespear.
More times than not recently when I am in line at the grocery store, the clerks have to warn those using their paper bags to hold them from the bottom because of how flimsy they are. I think they have been recycled enough to the point of being worthless.
IDK I’ve come to like those paper bags and asked for them long before plastic bags were touted to “save a tree.” It’s the continuous law making and subsequent tweaking when the unintended consequences become burdensome that bothers me.
But I did hear a complaint by a doordasher had that he could no longer carry a half dozen paper bags at once like he could those plastic ones so had to make more trips.
I was all for paper bags too before all of this change up. Would still like them if they were the old style. Not the thin flimsy style now.
Useless paper handles on some. They break carrying just a gallon of milk. Also, that flimsiness comes from post-recycling. Each generation of paper recycling reduces the cohesive strength of the paper and glues, and the fibers themselves break. Instead of nice, long-grain, strong paper stock, you get mush that doesn’t glue well and falls apart with moisture, as even some of the adhesives in the paper are water-soluble, you know, for green reasons. Which is fine, but in the end, you get a crappy paper bag or box that rips on anything you put in it. At some point, it’s only good for compost.
If you double up the paper bags, they don’t rip. The ones at whole foods are really strong and I can reuse them over and over. Bring a canvas bag or 2 and get paper if you run out of room.
You can always use a lunch bag for produce
Um…that’d be nice, but the closest Whole Foods is Santa Rosa. I’m not driving 200 miles for a paper bag. I have canvas bags I use, and sometimes a backpack instead. But the bags that are available at most places up here are garbage.
Odd. The paper bags seem more durable than ever, everywhere. Most grocery stores do have a hoard of boxes they offer. Do you live in the land of Cement by chance? I can see the Paperbag makers selling the weak pulp to the City folk as a means of protest against them. With plausible deniability, but……up here, hmmmm. Maybe fork over the extra 80 cents for eight bags eh, couldn’t break the bank. One item per bag, support wood! Go figure…..
So what about all the plastic your food comes prepackaged in?
When it comes to the California legislature never underestimate the possibility that their actions are driven by stupidity instead of corruption.
Banning the clear plastic produce bags was sheer stupidity.
I do a lot of homeless camp cleanup and never find plastic produce bags — think about it — have you ever seen tweekers and homeless people in the produce aisle?
The so-called compostable produce bags are an abomination — they’re flimsy and rip easily — and to me they feel slimy and nasty — I’m not putting my food in anything like that.
Banning the cheap plastic bags at checkout made sense, banning the more durable ones was questionable since they were reusable and weren’t a major part of plastic pollution — but banning the clear produce bags was sheer stupidity!
I can’t stand those green compostable bags. You can’t keep produce very long in them as things start to ripen more quickly. Bananas in particular. Artichokes start to get black petal tips in just a day or so. Bananas in particular. They’re also ridiculously flimsy, but stores frown on you bringing in your own bags or containers for bulk items (tare weight throws off the scales and costs you more). You have to use theirs.
Now who can we sue for the CRV redemption scam?
they should have just called it a container tax, which is what it has become in some rural areas of California.
many counties have minimal options to redeem CRV containers
Now we use the 3 million dollars and invest in recycling the plastic trash floating in the ocean.
✌️ 💚 🇺🇸
But now that we have huge plastic floating reefs, a bunch of oceanic wildlife have built a life around those plastic reefs. If we scoop it all up we’ll be destroying a whole new ecosystem of life that has developed.
We litter we lose, we clean up litter they lose. 🤷🏼♂️