The Northwest Grocery Association—which represents the largest grocery chains in Seattle, including Safeway, QFC, and Fred Meyer—tells The Stranger today that it is formally backing the Seattle City Council's proposal to ban plastic shopping bags and charge a five-cent fee for paper bags. That would save roughly 1,000,000 plastic bags per grocery store each year, says NWGA president Joe Gilliam, who represents 600 retail outlets in the Pacific Northwest.

"We support this right now," Gilliam says, and he's prepared to pressure the city council. What if the ordinance is challenged with a ballot referendum? "It's possible that we would contribute to the campaign to uphold the law."

That's a different tune than the NWGA sang two years ago, when it expressed concerns with an ordinance placing a 20-cent tax on all shopping bags. "The Nickels administration was married to this idea a 20-cent bag tax that went to government—that was a nonstarter," says Gilliam. His group stayed "neutral" on that fight "and we all saw the results of it," he says. The American Chemistry Council funded a $1.4 million campaign that ultimately overturned that measure in August 2009.

But this time, Gilliam says, grocery stores like a provision that allows them keep the nickel for each paper bag. That would offset the cost of switching from plastic to paper, which costs the average grocery store about $60,000 a year. "It's a far cry better than the old proposal that went down in flames," he says.

Gilliam believes industry support could allow this measure to stick. "As people see the retail community supports doing the right thing environmentally, and that there is a way to do it without causing the price of groceries to go up, I think that has value."

Winning support from grocers is a political win for Council Member Mike O'Brien, the bill's sponsor, who has been consulting grocers since early summer (an independent grocery group is still opposed).

"There's one thing no one can argue against, and that's the litter problem caused by plastic bags," Gilliam says. To quantify that litter, Gilliam explains that each store in his association use an average of 1,000,000 bags per year. The city estimates that only 13 percent of those bags are recycled.

While Gilliam says he would prefer a statewide bag ban to a city-by-city piecemeal approach (NWGA also supported a similar policy in Bellingham), he adds, "Right now it doesn't look like the legislature is going to take action, so the model that they have in Seattle is a very good one."