Plastic has been sacked at the registers at the Real Food Market and Deli.

As of last Friday, customers no longer have a choice between paper and plastic when having their groceries bagged.

Instead, customers can pay between a nickel and 15 cents for a paper bag (of varying size), or bring their own bags and get a modest discount at the register — a dime a bag, or 1 percent off your bill if you’re using a Real Food reusable sack. Cardboard boxes are also available.

Plastic grocery bags, in widespread use since the mid-1980s, are increasingly under fire as wasteful and environmentally hazardous. They’ve been banned at larger supermarkets in San Francisco, and a number of other cities around the country are considering similar ordinances.

Rachel Bennett, the Real Food Store’s front end manager, said the store tried various incentives to steer customers away from plastic before finally getting rid of the bags altogether. A couple of factors were at play, she said.

“One was just analyzing our mission as a store,” she said. “Our mission is providing a healthy option for people and contributing to a healthy environment, and we don’t think plastic bags are a part of that.”

Bennett said the store distributed more than 100,000 plastic bags last year, and had already gone through 94,000 in the first eight months of 2008. At 13.4 pounds per thousand, that’s well more than a ton of plastic bags distributed by one grocery in less than two years.

In addition to small discounts for people who bring their own bags, Bennett said the store has around 300 “borrow-a-bags” in circulation — reusable bags that can be borrowed, then brought back to the store.

“We’ve tried giving people incentives to sort of ease them into it,” she said. “But at this point we felt we had to do something that has a little more teeth to get the message across that this is something we value and we want our customers to value too.”

Keep Your Day Job: Most of us would probably agree that there’s no good way to go, but dying on the job, especially if you’re one who works to live (as opposed to living to work) has an especially sour sound.

The Department of Labor & Industry announced last month that 54 Montanans suffered work-related fatalities last year, up from 45 in 2006.

Transportation incidents accounted for 37 of those deaths, with contact with objects and falls responsible for five each. Three people died at work as a result of assaults or violent acts.

Breaking it down by industry, two sectors accounted for a dozen deaths each: agriculture, forestry and fishing, and transportation and warehousing.

Thirty-seven of those who died were working for someone else, while 17 were self-employed.

E-mail your Open for Business ideas to john.harrington@helenair.com.