The Laguna Beach City Council has officially proclaimed this Saturday "A Day Without a Bag."

The event is designed to encourage shoppers to forgo environmentally harmful single-use plastic bags in favor of reusable cloth or canvas bags to transport their groceries. The bags will be distributed free at most Laguna Beach grocery stores from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The specially designed navy blue bags are each made from 11 plastic bottles and have the words "The City of Laguna Beach" and "Protect Our Environment" silk-screened on them.

A Day Without a Bag is part of a broader effort throughout California to educate people and promote the use of reusable cloth bags in hopes of a statewide plastic bag ban.

"The City Council would like to reduce the use plastic bags and excite the public about reusable bags," says Mike Phillips, an environmental specialist as well as a liaison to Laguna Beach's Environmental Committee and the City Council. "We hope this event will make residents want to transition out of plastic bags and remind them to bring reusable bags to the store."

Max Isles, president of local environmental group Transition Laguna, asserted that Californians alone consume 19 billion plastic bags a year, only 5 percent of which are recycled. The remaining 95 percent will wind up clogging landfills, littering public spaces and will harm animal life for the next 1,000 years—which is the amount of time it takes for a plastic bag to decompose.

Isles expressed particular concern about plastic bags that flow into the ocean through Orange County's water system and threaten rare and endangered marine life. In fact, the L.A. Times emphasized this problem in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in 2006. In the northern Pacific Ocean, a garbage patch that's somewhere between the size of Texas and the United States is swirling with trash, including plastic debris that is ingested by birds and other wildlife. It's also not the only one; these trash vortexes exist in other oceans around the globe.

"One of my biggest frustrations is going to the store and seeing people use plastic bags that have a useful life of just a few minutes," says Isles. "Most people put a couple of groceries in each bag, leave the store with half a dozen plastic bags, and five minutes later arrive home, where the bags get put straight into the trash."

Phillips believes that A Day Without a Bag will be a success because of the number of residents who have already gotten involved in getting this initiative off the ground.

"It's truly been a city effort," says Phillips. Artwork for the bag design was donated by a local graphic artist, Bill Atkins. Funding to purchase the bags was donated by the Water Quality Department of Laguna Beach. And local organizations will be providing volunteers to hand out the bags on Saturday.

"I think people are going to be grateful to have a high-quality reusable bag," says Phillips. "And it's an opportunity to talk to the public one-on-one and give them something free for a change."