Long provided for free, plastic bags will soon come at a price in Rhode Island if some lawmakers have their way.

State lawmakers are targeting the ubiquitous shopping bag this session, introducing legislation that would discourage the use of the disposable, petroleum-based bags.

Flimsy yet enduring, plastic bags create unsightly litter, take up space in landfills, get snarled in trees and kill marine animals that mistake them for food.

“We have more than enough garbage at the Central Landfill,” said Rep. Amy Rice, D-Portsmouth. “It seems like unnecessary waste.”

Rice, the sponsor of a House bill that would require stores to give a 3-cent rebate to customers who bring their own bags, said last week she was going to change the bill to include a 5-cent tax on plastic bags starting in mid-2009 and a phaseout of their use by July 1, 2010.

Senate and House lawmakers have introduced a total of four bills this year aimed at weaning Rhode Islanders off the non-biodegradable sacks that have enjoyed widespread popularity for decades and are consumed by the billions every year in the United States.

Two of the bills would require stores to offer an instant rebate to customers who bring their own reusable bags — 3 cents per bag in the House version and 5 cents in the Senate.

After hearings on March 19, both were recommended for further study in committee.

Another House bill proposes to charge customers a penny for a bag, and another would ban them altogether.

Sen. V. Susan Sosnowski, D-South Kingstown, chairwoman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Agriculture, said there are several areas of contention to work out before the bill would have any chance of passing — specifically, any aspect of the legislation that would put any burden on business.

“I have a very pro-business Senate environmental committee,” she said. “They [the bills] are not on the front burner for a lot of people … [but] let’s face it, to have that many bills in the General Assembly it’s clearly important.”

THE RHODE ISLAND Resource Recovery Corporation, the independent state agency that runs the Central Landfill, in Johnston, estimates that Rhode Islanders consume 192 million plastic grocery bags a year. The number is closer to 300 million when bags from pharmacies, large retailers and produce and deli bags are factored in.

Statewide bans on plastic bags are uncommon in the United States, but Hawaiian lawmakers are considering a similar measure and an initiative proposed in Maryland failed in the state legislature earlier this month.

In San Francisco, lawmakers last year led a highly publicized and successful campaign to ban them. Boston, Portland, Ore., and Phoenix are considering banishing them as well.

Possibly the biggest success story is Ireland, where consumption dropped by 90 percent after the government enacted a 22-cent tax in 2002. It went even further and increased the tax to 33 cents after it noticed a purchasing rebound a few years later.

At hearings at the State House March 19, lobbyists representing grocers and convenience stores testified against the House and Senate bills to offer credits for reusable bags, and a lobbyist from the plastics industry opposed the House bill to charge customers a penny per bag.

“We don’t think bans or taxes on plastic bags are the right approach,” said Keith Christman, the senior director of packaging at the American Chemistry Council and Progressive Bag Affiliates. “[Among other things] if you tax or ban plastic bags, people will have to buy more plastic bags for other uses.”

Christman said plastic bags have advantages over paper bags, currently the most popular alternative for shoppers.

They are recyclable, people reuse them to line small garbage cans, pick up after their pets and hold trash in their cars, and although they are not biodegradable they require less energy than paper bags to produce, transport and recycle, he said.

Christman pointed to a recent study by the California-based Moore Recycling Associates Inc. that found plastic bag and film recycling has increased from 326,239 tons in 2005 to 406,005 tons in 2006.

Recycled plastic bags are commonly made into new bags and combined with used wood to create a composite decking material used for playground equipment, park benches and marina piers.

SARAH KITE, recycling manager for the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, has the unique vantage point of working where all the state’s trash is delivered and stored.

Each day she sees the flimsy bags fly out of the landfill’s dump site into nearby waterways and towns. The bags also get entangled in machinery, forcing shutdowns while workers cut away the thin, stretchy film from bulldozer tires and equipment in the recycling facility.

Kite said the agency supports a 25-cent fee for plastic bags and an instant rebate of a nickel for shoppers who opt for reusable ones.

The agency does not support a ban because it does not want to limit consumer choice when it comes to packing their groceries.

“The rebate coupled with a fee effectively achieves the same goal as a ban while still giving consumers a choice,” Kite said. “We need to put a value on it. Right now they are free, so they have no value. People will take responsibility for that item because they don’t want to waste it.”

For more than 2½ years the agency has operated the ReStore program, which supplies plastic bag collection containers at more than 170 retailers in the state.

To date, Rhode Island consumers have recycled 81 tons of plastic bags, newspaper sleeves and pallet wrap through ReStore, which then ships the bags to Trex, a Virginia company that makes composite decking.

That figure is far from the total tonnage of recycled bags, Kite said, because large grocery stores such as Whole Foods Market, Shaw’s and Stop & Shop operate their own collection programs.

Whole Foods has already announced that it will voluntarily phase out plastic bags in all its stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom by April 22, which is Earth Day.

Whole Foods Market stores in Rhode Island and the rest of the North Atlantic region enacted the ban on March 1, almost two months before the companywide mandate.

Long familiar with the array of reusable bags prominently displayed near the checkout counters, Whole Foods Market shoppers in Rhode Island have handled the elimination of plastic bags well.

“They are buying more of the reusable bags at the registers,” said Bonnie Frechette, the marketing team leader for the Providence Whole Foods Market on North Main Street. “We let them know way ahead, on Jan. 2, and gave away hundreds of free [reusable] bags on that day.”

Representatives of Shaw’s and Stop & Shop said their companies each recycle more than a thousand tons of plastic bags a year. Both said their stores have no plans to offer customers a rebate for reusable bag use, but will continue to promote reusable cloth bags. Stop & Shop, in collaboration with Citizens Bank, recently sent out a promotional coupon to 50,000 Rhode Island customers for a 99-cent reusable bag.

Through the ReStore program, Kite said, Resource Recovery can handle many more bags, for which it receives $250 to $325 a ton.

ReStore has helped cut down on litter, she said, but it’s still not enough.

“The ReStore program does nothing to reduce usage,” Kite said. “Now it is time to go another step.”

Eugenia Marks, the senior director of policy at the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, is ready to see a crackdown on the plastic bags.

Marks is also the state coordinator for the International Coastal Cleanup, which organizes volunteers to pick up litter at more than 60 sites every year.

Plastic bags are consistently among the top five types of litter found along the state’s beaches, behind common beach trash such as cigarette butts and food wrappers. The bags can take up to 1,000 years to photodegrade, or break down into smaller pieces through the absorption of light.

“In the coastal area, ingestion and entrapment are the two major problems [for wildlife] with plastic bags,” Marks said. “Plastic bags look like jellyfish and they have been found in the digestive tracts of marine turtles.”

The Audubon Society encourages shoppers to use durable cloth or nylon bags, instead of plastic or paper.

Marks recalls when plastic bags were seen as an improvement over paper bags decades ago, but now she says the costs of plastic outweigh the benefits.

“I remember when I was a child and my mother got upset because a damp item worked through the bag and everything spilled out into the parking lot. Plastics were supposed to take care of that,” Marks said. “But now there is a better way.”

ngarcia@projo.com