By Yael T. Abouhalkah, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

There's a limit, it turns out, to how far even Seattle residents will go in being green.

Voters Tuesday handily rejected an initiative for grocery stores to charge 20 cents for every plastic and paper bag provided to customers.

The loss was a big one for environmental groups that had hoped passage of the law could pave the way for other cities -- including Kansas City -- to initiate such charges.

But in Seattle, opponents had two things going for them:

-- The bad economy, which scuttled the attempt to add yet another fee to a trip to the grocery store.

-- A well-funded opposition (led by the American Chemistry Council), which spent more than $1.4 million to defeat the initiative.

Critics said many people re-use plastic bags (such as my daughter, who will use the 12 we gathered at a local shopping store last night as trash bags when she goes back to college this month). And paper bags often are used for holding newspapers to be recycled.

The Seattle City Council had approved the fee last year, saying it would encourage the use of cloth bags and other reusable bags. Some of the money would have been used to support Seattle's large recycling program.

But petitioners then gathered enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot.