• Plastic and paper bags aren’t free. Plastic bags cost grocery stores 3-5 cents each. Paper bags cost up to three times that much. More importantly, disposable bags cost our cities up to an estimated 17 cents per bag for disposal and cleanup, which really means it costs you the tax payer that amount.

• The production of plastic bags requires petroleum and often natural gas, both non-renewable resources that increase our dependency on foreign suppliers.

• Recycling these bags simply doesn’t cut it. From the process of sorting, to the contamination of inks and the overall low quality of the plastic used in plastics bags, recyclers would much rather focus on recycling the vast quantities of more viable materials such as soda and milk bottles that can be recycled far more efficiently. If the economics don't work, recycling efforts don't work.

• Many bags collected for recycling never get recycled. A growing trend is to ship them to Third world countries like India and China which are rapidly becoming the dumping grounds for the Western world's glut of recyclables. Rather than being recycled they are cheaply incinerated under more lax environmental laws

• As proposed, the Seattle Green Bag fee would reduce the use of paper and plastic bags by around 70%.

• Shortly after the signing of the ordinance, the American Chemistry Council quickly spent almost $250,000 bringing in paid signature gatherers from California to put a measure on the 2009 ballot on whether Seattle should keep its latest environmental law. After succeeding in buying their way out of this for another year (and stopping the public education work that was about to start), their crew moved on to Nevada.