California\u00a0Senate Bill 270, passed by the state legislature and signed into law in September, would ban many retail stores from dispensing single-use\u00a0plastic bags\u00a0as of July 1, 2015. But in another example of a special interest perverting democracy when it does not get its way, the\u00a0Plastics Industry Trade Association\u00a0(SPI) has announced it has collected over 800,000 signatures to qualify for a statewide up-or-down vote in November 2016. Once that tally is confirmed, the July ban would be postponed until the following year.You probably saw the sign gatherers at stores such as Target, where I was greeted with an appeal to sign my name and take sides with the \u201cAmerican Progressive Bag Alliance\u201d in order to reverse this \u201cbackdoor deal\u201d \u2014 until the fellow with the clipboard saw my reusable bags. \u201cOh, you\u2019re one of those,\u201d he said with an eye-roll, because as you know, someone like me who likes to wear labels, shops at Costco and makes mac-and-cheese out of a box (when no one is looking) is such a hippie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-27521","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n