At the east Sacramento Save Mart on Friday, the nonprofit Keep California Beautiful launched a statewide campaign meant to get shoppers to recycle more plastic grocery bags and bring their own bags to the store more often.

Staff at Save Mart stores – and potentially other local grocery chains as well – will wear "Got Your Bags?" buttons. The message will be stenciled at the entrances to some stores and may be broadcast over grocery PA systems as well.

"It's 'got milk?' for bags," said Christine Flowers-Ewing, executive director of Keep California Beautiful, which is funded by corporate donations as well as state grants.

The new push to change consumers' bagging behavior marks the latest turn in the state's plastic-bag wars.

In each of the last three years, the Legislature has debated – so far to no effect – a statewide 25-cent fee on bags at supermarkets and drugstores to discourage bag use. Meanwhile, city governments from Malibu to Oakland have enacted bag bans, justified mainly as litter-control measures.

Bag makers have fought back, suing three cities to overturn or limit the bans. They are now sponsoring legislation that would impose a fee on manufacturers to fund local litter control efforts, with the catch that the money would be available only to cities that haven't banned plastic bags.

The industry is helping to fund the "Got Your Bags?" campaign, hoping to show that more recycling and reuse can achieve the same litter-reduction goals as a ban.

"Plastic bags are recyclable – we want people to know that it's important to bring them back" to stores, said Salim Bana, director of international sales at South Carolina-based Hilex Poly Co., at Friday's event. The company is the world's largest maker of carry-out bags and a major bag recycler.

Plastic bags are an environmental problem mainly because they are easily blown out of garbage cans and trucks and end up in sewers, waterways and the ocean. Cities around San Francisco Bay are likely to soon face a federal mandate to cut the amount of trash – including plastic bags – that makes its way into the bay.

In open water, plastic bags break down into tiny bits. There's growing concern about the amount of plastic found in the open ocean. Research is under way to assess how much of that waste starts out as plastic bags – as opposed to other types of plastic – and its impact on marine life.

Since 2007, California has required supermarkets and large drugstores to provide recycling bins for plastic bags. It's unclear how heavily these are used, though. A study of bag-recycling rates has been delayed more than a year by the state's budget troubles.

In the Sacramento region, waste collectors generally accept plastic bags in curbside recycling bins. But bags tend to cause sorting problems at central recycling facilities, so it's better to put them in the grocery store bins, said Patty Moore, a recycling consultant based in Petaluma.

For grocers, getting customers to bring their own bags offers a chance to trim costs. A typical supermarket spends $30,000 to $60,000 a year on checkout bags – paper or plastic – according to Steve Gaines, Save Mart's senior director of retail efficiency. That's a significant amount in the slim-margin supermarket business, where median after-tax profits were about $320,000 per store last year, according to the Food Marketing Institute.

Pushing bag awareness also helps burnish a grocer's environmental image. At the same time, though, stores don't want to preach.

"We're really trying to … move them down the reusable path without having them think we're pressing," Gaines said.

On Friday, Save Mart gave away a reusable bag to every customer who spent more than $20 at its Sacramento-area stores.

In the Save Mart parking lot on Folsom Boulevard, Susan Milner of Roseville doubted she'd get in the habit of recycling or reusing bags.

However: "One of my daughters is really good about it," she said.

A few cars down, customer Tim Comstock was loading one of the free bags into the back seat of his car. He hasn't made a habit of reusing bags, but he said his new bag is going to change that.

"I probably won't do it every time because I'll probably forget," he said. "But every little bit helps. That plastic's going to be around a lot longer than you and me."

At Friday's event, Sacramento City Councilman Steve Cohn said he's interested in exploring the possibility of stronger bag controls than what Keep California Beautiful is proposing.

"I think this is great – I just don't know if it'll be enough," he said.

Call The Bee's Jim Downing, (916) 321-1065.