The plastic bag example has some flaws for the overall point you’re trying to make, in my view. I wasn’t enamored of the idea when it passed, by my family switched to the re-usable bags. We don’t spend an extra $1 per grocery trip — we re-use our bags. We keep a few in each car. And the bags are more generally useful for kids’ sleepovers and carrying bottles or milk without breaking open. Life is good.

And one of the things you don’t see anymore are those disposable plastic bags all over big box parking lots all over Austin. Or in our parks. Or in downtown. It has been a massive reduction in visible pollution, closest analogy to which in my mind is when they got rid of the tear away tabs on soda cans. Where can you still see plastic bags piling up in the parking lots downwind? Bee Caves and 360, where the HEB there is outside Austin jurisdiction on this issue… And then you see them in the creek by twin falls ,etc. because people use them to carry their drinks and food down to the creeks to picnic, and they blow away or are discarded carelessly.

Measuring what gets into the trash is only one measure of the pollution impact. And sometimes a slight inconvenience is worth it. I view it as similar to watering restrictions during droughts. Sometimes the common good requires doing things that are not well-incented by capitalism.