Way back in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate studying political science at the University of Michigan, I took classes that examined the environmental issues involved in politics. Later, during my Ph.D. studies at Michigan in the early 1990s, I focused my research on the issues surrounding environmental security concerns that faced the U.S. military. It may come as a surprise to some of my dear readers the Department of Defense and the constituent military services are all-in on environmental issues, and that’s not because the Pentagon has been taken over by environmental extremists.

Rather, the military leadership of the United States has, for the past two decades at least, understood better than many civilian sectors in our society how important environmental issues are to national defense. Many security issues, often driven or exacerbated by climate change, threaten our military operations. The DOD wisely decided it is better to get ahead of such issues than to try to catch up later. For example, as rising ocean levels slowly but surely put various naval facilities at risk, the Navy is proactively raising dock levels and is taking other steps to mitigate that impact of climate change. Overall, the military is being proactive and is getting out in front on climate change dangers.

Which, of course, brings us to plastic and paper bags in Colorado.

A recent Colorado Politics story reported on a new law took effect last Sunday. House Bill 21-1162 mandates most businesses that use plastic or paper bags start charging a 10-cent fee for every bag used by a customer. The goal is to get Coloradans ready for 2024, when single-use bags are banned entirely. For the next year, you can pay a dime per bag, but the hope is you as a consumer will get fed up with the fee and start using reusable bags (which the smart businesses will have ready for sale at every checkout counter). Those bags will eventually pay for themselves.

Sixty percent of those dimes will go to the local city and/or county government, and 40% will go to the retailer involved to help cover new costs as we transition to the new single-use-bag-free world.

So, just as the military is trying to get ahead of things, Gov. Jared Polis and the state legislature are to be commended for getting Colorado on that same forward-thinking path when it comes to environmental concerns.

Back when I was a kid growing up in Michigan, the state government there passed a law banning the use of soda and pop cans and bottles that couldn’t be reused, and levied a 10-cent per-bottle fee, collected when you made your purchase. So, if you bought a six-pack of soda, you paid an extra $0.60 at check out. Each store was then required to have a system set up that allowed the customers to bring their empties back and to then collect their 60-cent refund. The idea was littering (largely made up of plastic and glass bottles) would go down, as people would want their deposit back, and that even if some cans and bottles were tossed, other folks would start collecting the “free” containers and return them to a retailer to collect the deposits.

That system worked great, even with a few rough spots when first implemented. I would expect Colorado retailers to have similar growing pains, but ultimately bringing your own reusable bags to the grocery store will be as natural as bottle deposits are to folks in Michigan today.

One measure of whether a new law is too extreme is to look at how the businesses involved have reacted. Giant retailers, like Walmart and King Soopers are already ahead of the game and have professed strong support for the new law. They believe it will help them reach their own corporate goals of reducing emissions significantly in coming years. So how radical can an idea be, if Walmart is on board?

The dime fee is an important step in helping Coloradans understand the full cost of the products they buy. Back when I was in grad school, I learned roughly 11% of the cost of a product is to cover the back-end expenses of eventually disposing of the item and its packaging. I’m sure many of you recently opened over-packaged Christmas gifts. Often that is done to reduce theft (bigger boxes are harder to steal) but such packaging increases the environmental fingerprint of the product involved. By asking consumers to pay a dime a bag, they are really asked to cover the costs of the products they are buying, post-purchase. And that’s a good idea.

I commend Gov. Polis and our legislators for their courage in passing the bag-fee law. It is good for Colorado, and it is good for the retailers involved. And, like most folks, I fully expect to find myself paying a dime a bag from time to time when I forget my reusable bags. But that experience will hopefully get my brain re-wired to remembering to bring my own bags.

Hopefully, a year from now, we’ll transition away from single-use bags quietly and without too many folks even noticing.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.