The City Council has clearly weakened in its resolve to curb the use of plastic bags in Oahu shops, to the point where the public has to wonder: What would be the point of enacting Bill 10 at all?

The measure, in the version that has passed the Public Works and Sustainability Committee last week, has been watered down and now does not seem designed to accomplish the primary goal of encouraging more environmentally friendly habits among consumers. Meanwhile, state lawmakers have been lagging in pushing forward their own, more sensible approach of assessing shoppers a 10-cent fee for the bags, money that would be directed, in part, to a watershed protection fund.

The Council’s Bill 10 was originally formulated as an outright ban on "nonbiodegradable" plastic bags, allowing only compostable, reusable or recyclable paper bags to be provided at the point of sale.

The current version of the proposal would divide the progress toward the final ban into three phases. To begin with, merchants would be charged 3 cents for each nonbiodegradable plastic bag they distribute to their customers at the points of sale. In Phase 2, the fee would go up to 5 cents. In both phases, the fees collected would underwrite the program and recycling efforts. Finally — though it’s uncertain when it would happen — the third phase would ban the bags altogether.

It’s hard to understand what the Council hopes to accomplish with this. Merchants would pay the fee and, presumably, recoup that expense by broadly raising prices of the merchandise. The cost of the bags would then be hidden, and consumers would have no incentive to change their shopping habits.

As for the retailers themselves, the pushback was easy to predict. The essence of their complaint can be summed up in the testimony by Carol Pregill, president of Retail Merchants of Hawaii, who underscored the senselessness of this approach.

"With the exception of reusable bags, the stated preferable alternatives in this bill, recyclable paper bags and compostable bags, are not viable substitutes and have serious negative environmental and higher cost implications," Pregill said.

So the score here would be: Retailers 0, Environment 0.

Committee Chairman Stanley Chang acknowledged that the bill needs work and cited as an example that more information is needed on the relative environmental effects of different bag types.

But the problem is more fundamental than that. If consumers are to be prodded toward using plastic bags less frequently — possibly part of a transition toward a complete ban — it would be far smarter to enact an ordinance that actually gives them a choice. Either they should pay for the bags or, if the bags aren’t worth a dime apiece to them, come up with another way to haul their groceries out to the car.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. Anyone who has shopped at the discount membership clubs, where bags have never been provided, has figured out a strategy of using the discarded packing boxes the store may have handy, or simply repacking the items in the car trunk using boxes they’ve brought from home.

The best outcome would be that the Council shelves Bill 10 in favor of the state bill. That originally was Senate Bill 2511, but because it got snagged in the House Finance Committee, the bag-fee proposal is now included in House Bill 2483.

Or, if the state push does indeed stall, the Council should borrow similar language and pass a Bill 10 that represents a better compromise of competing interests.