It is a question Honolulu shoppers will never have to answer at the supermarket again if a proposal at City Hall becomes law.

The city may prohibit big businesses from handing out plastic bags free to customers.

Plastic bags are convenient, but the average bag is used for only 12 minutes. After that they become an environmental issue.

"There's a lot of plastic bags just in this one area," Suzanne Frazer said as she stood on the lookout above Makapuu Beach.

Frazer is co-founder of an organization called Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii. She spends her time organizing beach clean-ups and picking up trash.

"What I see is preventable trash. This is trash that doesn't have to be here because people can use a reusable bag and not the disposable bag," Frazer said.

Plastic bags are high on Fraszer's litter hit list because they seem to last forever.

"Yes, it will break into smaller and smaller pieces, but it won't ever go away. It's just going to turn into like plastic dust and be easily ingested by animals," Frazer said.

Plastic bags not only litter our land. They blow into the ocean and when eaten by turtles, fish, and seabirds that plastic becomes a killer.

The proposal at city hall is designed to help clean up the mess.

Council members Ann Kobayashi and Donovan Dela Cruz want big retailers to have to switch to either bio-degradable bags or recyclable paper bags.

"Companies that make over a million dollars a year, they would be the first to have this ban on plastic bags, and they have a year to institute this," Kobayashi told KGMB9.

"Cities across the nation, if they haven't passed a similar bill, they are considering it right now," Dela Cruz added.

Back at the beach, Frazer, who never runs out of plastic to pick up, thinks the ban on plastic bags is a great idea.

She said in lieu of plastic people can use biodegradable bags made from corn, or they can take inexpensive, environmentally friendly, re-useable bags with them every time they go to the market.

"I hand this to the check-out person and they can use it like a plastic bag," Frazer said while showing off a re-usable bag. "It has that little loop that they hook on and they open it up and they pack it for me and I say thank you for helping me save the environment."

The Maui County Council is considering a similar proposal for businesses that do more than a quarter million dollar in annual sales.

Retailers said switching to environmentally friendly bags would add to cost, but they encourage everyone to bring re-useable bags with them to market.

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