Reusable bags, a foul, stinking tribal badge of the environmental hipster, became mandatory on the West Coast and then on the East Coast as cities rushed to ban or fine anyone using plastic bags. Now San Francisco, which helped foist this toxic trend on the nation, is temporarily reversing course because of the coronavirus.

In the latest sign of how dramatically the coronavirus pandemic is altering the social landscape, even the liberal San Francisco Bay Area this week banned reusable grocery bags as a sanitary measure, dismaying recycling advocates who say durable sacks should still be allowed at stores.

Recycling advocates = environmentalists = advocates of human extinction for the sake of the planet

But we always knew that reusable bags were unhealthy. They spread disease, they nurture bacteria, they cause illness, and they kill.

All the studies and scientific materials on the subjects were ignored for the sake of the environmentalist agenda.

Among the updated requirements in the order, which lasts through May 3: “Not permitting customers to bring their own bags, mugs, or other reusable items from home.”

Tragic. And here they’d gotten people to the point of carrying their own metal straws.

California has aggressively moved toward reusable containers in an effort to reduce plastic consumption. Gov. Gavin Newsom last year signed the nation’s first state law banning hotels from using small single-use plastic containers for shampoo and other toiletries. State lawmakers have also worked on bills that would phase out single-use plastic by 2030 in California.

They helped make this happen.

Recycling advocates said they would prefer a statewide policy that says customers can still bring their bags into stores, but grocery employees don’t have to fill them.

“This fear of bringing reusable bags into the stores is misguided, but I certainly understand why store employees don’t want to handle somebody else’s things,” said Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. “I wouldn’t have any expectation that somebody is going to put my groceries into my bag that I brought from home.”

Please. If enviros are allowed to bring their filthy reusable bags into the store, minimum wage grocery workers will be expected to fill them. Environmentalist hipsters want grocery workers to die for their virtue signaling.