Plastic bag ban begins in Palm Desert

Don’t forget your reusable shopping bag before heading into a major retailer in Palm Desert.

Starting Wednesday, the City of Palm Desert will be the latest community to have a plastic bag ban for most major stores.

All grocery and retail stores in Palm Desert with gross annual sales of $2 million or more will be prohibited from providing customers with a free single-use plastic carryout shopping bag.

“That’s absolutely insane, back home we use plastic bags every where we go, I wouldn’t know what to do without them,” said Alan Setter who is visiting Palm Desert from Ohio.

“It’s greed is what it is, they want to charge that extra ten cents, can you imagine that extra ten cents for every bag that Walmart sells, how much money they are making off of that?” Said Ronnie Gasaway of Palm Desert.

Some people are for the ban on plastic shopping bags.

“You know the animals get into it, it’s not friendly to the environment so I think it’s a good idea,” said Douglas Nelsen who was out shopping with his family.

All other full-line grocery and retail stores are prohibited from providing customers with single-use plastic carryout shopping bags on October 1, 2015.

Smaller stores and gas stations can provide customers with a grocery-sized reusable paper bag or reusable bag, but these stores must charge 10 cents for each paper bags.

The paper bag revenue is retained by the store to offset the cost of using paper bags.

California passed a law in 2014 that prohibits stores from handing out single-use plastic bags for free. This law was set to go into effect in July.