Aug. 21 Daily News editorial

Seattle voters’ slapdown of that city’s 20-cent fee on disposable paper and plastic shopping bags this week apparently caught some supporters by surprise. It shouldn’t have. Only the margin of the bag fee’s defeat in environmentally conscious Seattle — 58 percent against to 42 percent for — was surprising.

Supporters pin most of the blame for Tuesday’s vote on the plastics industry’s deep pockets. The industry bankrolled Tuesday’s referendum and spent about $1.4 million opposing the fee. Supporters raised only about $93,000. A more level financial playing field might well have made the vote closer, but we suspect the result would have been the same.

This disposable bag fee was a bad idea put forward at the worst possible time — a paternalistic tax served up in the midst of the worst recession since World War II. Only someone relatively insulted from popular sentiment and the economy’s ill effects could have expected voters to cheerfully embrace this bag fee.

This is not to dismiss environmental concerns about widespread use of disposable plastic bags. American consumers use and dispose around 100 billion plastic shopping bags each year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Producing those bags burns an estimated 12 million barrels of oil. Equally if not more concerning, only about 1 percent of the bags are being recycled. The rest litter streets, clog city drains, accumulate at landfills and pollute our oceans, where they can endanger marine life.

There are smart ways to address these environmental concerns. Seattle’s disposable bag fee was not one of them. It was too broadly written, as well as unnecessarily punitive. The fee applied to both plastic and paper bags. The inclusion of paper in Seattle’s understandably riled Rep. Dean Takko, D-Longview, who has a good number of constituents working in the pulp and paper industry. Takko correctly noted in an interview last summer with Daily News reporter Cheryll A. Borgaard that paper is easily recycled. Takko cited several concerns about the Seattle bag law: “recycling, jobs and it’s literally a tax that will be passed on to the consumer.”

The fee actually would have been a fairly direct tax on the consumer, one that Seattle officials expected to generate $10 million in annual revenue. The amount of the tax may have seemed insignificant to the Seattle City Council members who enacted the bag fee. The voters who struck down the law this week disagreed. They likely saw the fee in much the same light as Adam Parmer, a spokesman for the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax, who called it unnecessary, costly and the wrong way to change behavior.

Parmer’s right. Proponents of this law would do better to promote recycling and public awareness of the environmental concerns associated with plastic shopping bags. Seattle’s shopping bag fee was the wrong approach.