Just a little plastic bag

The other day I was in the grocery store buying a bunch of things including a single hamburger bun.  I didn't put the single bun in a plastic bag because that seemed silly and wasteful - I don't want to use up extra plastic for no reason, and I don't want to create extra plastic trash.

The cashier was not amused.  She put the bun on the scanner to ring it in, and then went to get a plastic bag for it.  I asked her not to, and she got angry at me, telling me I had to take the bun off the scanner myself because she could not.  Her hands had touched money, and she wasn't willing to touch the bun again for fear of passing along germs.  I kinda figure that once you have touched an item once you aren't going to hurt anything by touching it again, but she wasn't having any of it.

This sort of thing happens all the time.  I constantly have to fight to get cashiers to stop putting extra plastic bags on stuff that I buy.  I purchase mushrooms, they try to put extra bags on them.  I refuse the bags and toss the mushrooms loose into my grocery bag, and they look at me like I am a demon sacrificing a baby on an altar made of blood and bones.

Behaviour of this sort is far beyond any reasonable set of precautions against illness and is straight up purity signalling.  You don't need all that plastic to separate everything from everything else - all those foods are going to end up being dissolved by acid in my stomach, after all - but we use packaging as a way to suggest purity and cleanliness even when there is no actual need for it.  When I say that I don't need a plastic bag it goes past logistics and straight into being unclean.

Plastic bags swirling around the world as trash in a dump, litter near a highway, or garbage in the ocean simply aren't the cashier's problem.  They can't be blamed for the Pacific Garbage Patch, but they *can* be blamed for not offering a bag when somebody wanted one, so all the bags get used, even when there is no reason to.  Negative externalities kick us all in the collective junk, as people fail to worry about the consequences of their actions when those consequences are borne jointly rather than individually.

I see this as a failure of regulation.  In my mind garbage should have a price, and it should be borne by the consumer.  Every extra layer of packaging should have a cost.  Every object that has to be recycled should require a fee be paid by the manufacturer, and everything that must be thrown out should have a much larger fee.  The government and society is going to have to pay to deal with that shit once it is done being used, so the company producing it should have to pay for that.  If we actually charged people for the cost of cleaning up the messes they create we would have far fewer messes, no doubt about that.

Want a flimsy clear plastic bag to put your mushrooms in?  Fork over a dollar, because that is what is costs to clean it up.  Want plastic bags to carry your groceries?  No problem, just $1.50 each.  It wouldn't prevent all waste, of course, but it would reduce it a great deal, and would finally break past that sanctity argument people constantly use to justify their polluting ways.

Monetary incentives won't solve all these problems, naturally.  But they can help, not least of which by getting people to see that while a thing might cost a penny to make, the real cost to all of us is much, much more.