My personal experience is that soon after the 8 cent bag fee went into effect, I started bringing reusable bags to the store virtually every time. This can’t rationally be attributed to the actual cost – even if your time is worth $20/hour, if you forget the bag and you spend 15 seconds going back to get it, you’ve already lost money!
To me it seems it changed my habit because I liked the feeling of “beating the system” every time the self checkout asked me how many bags I wanted to buy and I pressed 0. And now that my habits are re-wired to bring bags to the store, I’d probably keep doing it even if the bag ordinance went away. (There is also the fact that some stores like Fred Meyer in Bellevue only sell paper bags without handles. As aggravating as this is, at least it’s one more thing encouraging people to bring their own bags.)
But a 2024 study suggested that the ordinance did not reduce waste as much as people had hoped:
https://www.kuow.org/stories/new-report-finds-pros-and-cons-with-washington-s-plastic-bag-ban
in part because the stores started selling thicker plastic bags hoping that people would re-use them, but people just treat them as single-use plastics, resulting in more plastic waste per bag for the people who use them once.
In 2026 the fee is scheduled to go up from 8 cents to 12 cents. My first thought was that this wouldn’t help because almost nobody cares about the actual fee — you have people like me who (irrationally) are bringing their own bags to “beat the system”, and other people who don’t care. Either way, 8 cents vs 12 cents shouldn’t matter.
On the other hand, the fee increase might make a difference, again for entirely irrational psychological reasons: The fee increase will be in the news, which will be another reminder for people who want to change their habits but didn’t bother last time.
What if it still doesn’t reduce plastic waste as much as people hoped? An economist’s answer would be to increase the fee so that it reflects the total environmental cost associated with a plastic bag (i.e., negative externality), added to the manufacturer’s cost of making it. And you could have one fee for thin plastic bags and another for the thick ones. After that, even if people don’t change their behavior, an economist would argue there’s no “problem to solve” — people who buy the bags have paid into the system to cover the costs they’re imposing on the rest of society through their use of disposable plastics. (I have no idea what that externality price per bag would be.)
On the other hand, if we’re still trying to appeal to people’s irrationality, maybe have an express lane only for people who bring their own bags. Now you not only save 8 cents, but you have the admiration and envy of a bunch of total strangers that you’ll never see again, as you breeze through the fast lane.
submitted by /u/bennetthaselton
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