■ What would be local consequences if Gov. Jerry Brown signs historic legislation?

Legislation that would ban single-use plastic shopping bags has reached Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk, the closest any bag ban bill has come to becoming law.

Compromise helped get the bill this far, said Jenesse Miller, communications director of the California League of Conservation Voters, which has advocated for both this legislation as well as previous efforts.

And, Benicia Mayor Elizabeth Patterson said, the ban would be good for businesses that want certainty and consistency so they won’t have to accommodate different rules for different cities in which they operate.

Miller said the current Senate Bill 270, authored by Senators Alex Padilla, D-Van Nuys, and Kevin de León and Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, received support from those who opposed previous efforts to ban single-use plastic shopping bags.

“I was furious when it went down in 2010,” she said of an earlier effort to ban plastic bags. But SB 270 had to be tweaked and modified to garner enough votes, she said.

For instance, Padilla announced in January that some opponents of SB 270 were won over when he agreed to make $2 million from bottle and can recycling available in the form of grants and loans to help California plastic bag manufacturers retool their plants so they can produce reusable plastic bags, Miller said.

Another compromise was to redirect the 10-cents-a-bag charge to customers who forgot to bring their own bags. Under a revision of SB 270, that money would be kept by the stores for specific uses, she said.

The bill also got the backing of those who decided California needs a statewide policy, rather than the variety of rules that have been approved by individual cities and counties, she said.

Despite the compromises, Miller said, the bill faced challenges on its way to passing the Legislature. It initially failed in the Assembly and had to be brought back for another vote.

But it has withstood challenges from plastic bag manufacturers from other states, she said, even though they have lobbied against the bill.

“(The manufacturers) don’t want it statewide,” she said.

Once California’s law is in place, other states are likely to use the bill as a template, Miller said, but could make improvements after watching how well this law works.

She called the removal of single-use shopping bags “low-hanging fruit” in the drive to reduce dependency on plastic. But it’s “a logical starting point” and an important goal itself.

“They blow out of the landfills,” Miller said. Eventually, they get into the nation’s waterways and flow out to the ocean, where they’re eaten by sea turtles that mistake them for jellyfish, causing the turtles to sicken, starve and die.

The bags also break down into smaller pieces and are eaten by birds, fish and other animals with the same results, Miller noted.

Tons of plastic bags reach the ocean, and the bits that aren’t sickening marine life become part of the garbage collected in such oceanic gyres as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, scientists have said. Because the size of the plastic particles are microscopic, this and other patches can’t be photographed by satellites. But its size has been estimated from 270,000 square miles to nearly 6 million square miles.

By comparison, California is less than 159,000 square miles.

Miller acknowledged a California plastic bag ban wouldn’t prevent the purchase of trash bags or the distribution of plastic produce bags in California, nor would the law affect other states directly. “We’re California-based, and this is bigger than just California,” she said. “But the products are so outrageously unnecessary.”

Customers have been able to recycle those plastic bags at supermarkets and retailers, but Marie Knutson, recycling coordinator for Republic Services for Martinez and Benicia, said only 5 percent of plastic bags that are handed out are ever brought back.

The recycled plastic bags are baled for sale and shipment overseas as plastic film that is used in the manufacture of other products, Knutson said. But the U.S. lags behind other nations in developing ways to use non-virgin plastic in manufacturing, she said.

If a person puts the bags in the brown recycling bin, the bags can become tangled in the conveyor belts that carry recyclable products for sorting, she said.

If they’re thrown away, they’re carried out to landfills, where they’re nicknamed “kites” because of their tendency to catch the air and blow away.

Landfills keep building taller fences, and garbage trucks have moving tarps designed to confine the bags, but Knutson said some inevitably escape.

As one of those active in the Sept. 20 Coastal Cleanup, Knutson noted that Benicia is a coastal community and a place where bags easily can get into waterways, where they harm marine life.

When volunteers head to those waterways Sept. 20 to gather up trash and debris, she said, plastic bags and cigarette butts will account for the bulk of the garbage they’ll pick up.

“I do hope it passes and is signed,” she said of SB 270.

Patterson said she, too, hopes Brown will sign the legislation.

Though she said the governor often holds his opinions and decisions “close to his vest,” she added that “I think it has a good chance of being signed.”

Patterson said one big reason the bill finally cleared both legislative houses was concern over how rules vary among the 100 or so communities that have banned single-use plastic bags.

She said the law would provide retailers with statewide regulations to follow, giving them certainly they currently don’t have. The law also is likely to reduce their operating costs, she said, because businesses wouldn’t have to accommodate different regulations in different places statewide.

“It’s one of the frustrations retailers had,” Patterson said, pointing out that Ace Hardware is among the companies that have endorsed SB 270. “Uniformity of regulation is really the key. They had a good bill they could live with.”

She said she hopes SB 270 is the first of many bills to reduce the use of plastic bags. One reason is environmental, she said, citing some of the same problems the bags cause for wildlife that Miller described.

But the bags cause other problems, too: Not long ago, a plastic bag got caught in the differential of Patterson’s car, damaging it. The repair bill was $600.

“It’s not that rare,” she said of the incident.

“We have choices,” she said, explaining that as people modify their lifestyle and dependence on one-use bags, they may wonder why change didn’t occur earlier.

Not only can individual consumers select reusable bags, she said, but companies can choose to develop and sell multiple types of those bags — those with appealing designs, those that protect produce and other models to accommodate customers’ needs.

“This is the age of innovation,” Patterson said.