Apr 7 - CA Supreme Court to Hear Manhattan Beach Plastic Bag Case on May 4

Over the last several years, CAW has worked to promote reusable bags and helped dozens of communities to ban single-use plastic bags. In an attempt to delay or stop these ordinances, the plastic bag industry formed a coalition of manufacturers and issued litigation threats to intimidate local jurisdictions. In 2008, the City of Manhattan Beach passed a plastic bag ban and was sued by the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition. Read more about the lawsuit and the amicus curiae brief that we submitted here.

The California Supreme Court has agreed to hear CAW’s petition to overturn the plastic industry challenge to local plastic bag bans. The oral argument date is set for May 4, 2011 at 1:30 pm in San Francisco. See the court docket here.

Outside of the courts, CAW continues the battle:

In the Media. CAW is countering the plastic industry’s misleading campaign to scare consumers away from reusable bags. Read our executive director’s response to these scare tactics here.
In Town Halls. CAW is working with dozens of cities and counties to introduce and enact local plastic bag bans. See the list of local plastic bag ordinances here.
In the Legislature. The plastic bag and chemical industries spent over $4.5 million in 2010 to block our legislation to phase out plastic bags state-wide. Despite that we still came within a few votes of passage on the last night of session.

New data reveals that our efforts are paying off. Annual retail plastic bag generation is down from more than 18 billion bags in 2007 to less than 12 billion bags today. But that’s still 12 billion too many, and CAW will continue our efforts to fight against plastic pollution and waste.