It starts off innocently enough. A well-intentioned grocery bagger asks, “paper or plastic?”

As your fingers strum through plastic cards in your wallet to pay for a conveyer belt full of groceries, your mouth absent-mindedly mutters “plastic.”

With groceries paid for, you push your shopping cart full of food and plastic grocery bags to your car, stuff the bounty in your trunk and zoom home.

There’s meat and dairy products that need refrigeration. Right away.

Out of the car and onto the kitchen countertops the bags go. One by one, they’re emptied, rumpled and piled onto the counter.

One bag becomes the go-to holder. Many fit into one. They’re scrunched up, smooshed in, packed down.

Then — no matter how organized you pretend to be — they’re shoved into some nook or cranny in your kitchen, be it in a drawer or under the sink somewhere.

Then, after the damage is done, you remember: You have a stash of reusable cloth bags you should have used instead. They’re hanging on the coat rack that lives right by the front door.

No matter how well-intentioned you are or how much you love Mother Earth, we’re all the same. We have karate classes to get to, Boy or Girl Scout badges to earn, barbecues to attend and master bathrooms to renovate.

Sometimes we just forget the little things.

Well, the little things turn into big things if they’re left unattended. That’s exactly the case with those handy-dandy plastic grocery bags that, I’m convinced, mate when I’m not watching. How else can there be that many in the house?

According to Heather Hadley, a Bainbridge Island woman on a crusade against produce bags, the average shopper uses about 10 plastic produce bags a week.

That’s a lot of bags.

And those bags have to go somewhere. I either reuse them as garbage bags or recycle them at grocery stores that graciously offer that service.

But that’s little consolation for the fact that I’m unintentionally being wasteful.

I try to be conscious of the impact I’m having on the environment — I recycle everything possible, I turn the water off when I’m brushing my teeth, we’ve recently installed energy-efficient windows in our home, and we use those cool light bulbs that last for years instead of months.

Oh yeah … and I ride the wheels off my Raleigh Cadent. If I can ride, I don’t drive.

Occasionally, I forget to take my cloth bags to the store. And that’s not even considering the amount of energy, time and water that goes into the packaging protecting the food I buy.

I’m suffering from an extreme amount of eco-guilt.

I guess we should all do what we can but forgive ourselves when we slip.

So when the question “paper or plastic” fills up our pantry space, we don’t always have to let it fill up our conscience, too.