After coaching high school basketball for a few years, I learned several important life lessons: do not coach high school basketball, go back to graduate school … but I learned some important economic lessons as well. One of these is no matter how much pleading you do for a kid to play harder, nothing gets the message across quite like putting his rear-end on the bench. Apparently the feeling of the butt hitting the pine is quite the economic incentive for a player to focus his efforts.

The lessons of the power of incentives are all around us — for example, see the reign of terror Kalin Lucas of Michigan State has unleashed on the Big Ten since his early-season benching — yet measures aimed at environmental conservation frequently eschew cold, hard economics in favor of feel-good awareness. This is the case with the plastic bag recycling mandate recently implemented by the city of Madison. Instead of creating economic incentives for Madisonians to dunk their plastic bag usage, the city has shot an airball by creating a symbolic fine that it has no intention of enforcing.

As I may have possibly argued before, it is time to send the feel-good environmentalism embodied by the plastic bag mandate into retirement. The new environmental ethic shoots for results, and the best way to get consumers to turn over their habits is to give them an economic impetus to do so. Just as basketball players respond to bench splinters in their fannies, so do consumers respond when they must drop some dimes.

Even if members of the Madison City Council were such phenomenal ballers that they never got benched, they have still likely carried a wallet around. In light of this, it is surprising that the Council decided to bother investing in the plastic bag mandate. The incentives to conserve created by the “fines” approach Shaq’s free throw percentage (low), and the hassle required to transport bags to one city’s recycling bins is approximately equal to the badassedry of Bo Ryan (high).

The city of Madison would probably be more successful in reducing plastic bag use by plastering advertisements all over town that feature Trevon Hughes and his fro-hawk kicking it at the grocery store with reusable bags. I know that trying to be cool like Trevon would most definitely make me change my habitual plastic bag usage.

Now just as there are many ways for Duke to fail in the NCAA Tournament, there are many ways to create economic incentives for people to stop using plastic bags. The city of Madison could implement a bag-and-trade program or perhaps a death (to plastic) tax.

If those do not work they could … charge people for plastic bags, baby! What a sensational idea! A PTPer in the world of environmental conservation! If people have to pay, they are much more likely to do a dip-see-do, switch-a-roo to reusable bags.

My apologies to the reader for going all Dick Vitale. I am clearly very excited about the idea of incorporating behavior-changing economics into environmental conservation measures. I really am.

An excellent example of the success of charging folks a small fee for plastic bags is provided by the city of Washington D.C. The city’s program is only about a month old, so no official data is available, but a Jan. 23 article in The Washington Post provided some early anecdotal evidence on the success of the program in reducing the volume of plastic bags used in the District, as well as some interesting views on the human psychology of the 5 cent bag tax.

The owner of one grocery store reported his store’s weekly plastic bag orders are already half their previous size. Also, author and Duke economics professor Dan Ariely offered some interesting insight into why charging just 5 cents for a plastic bag can yield big results, “When it goes from zero to even a very small charge, it can feel very bad. It creates a very small financial burden but a very big emotional reaction.”

The early indications are the Washington D.C. plastic bag tax is going to be a success, and a similar program implemented throughout the entire nation of Ireland has been successful as well. As the Post article shows, American consumers are about as rational as high school sophomores, so putting an up-front cost on each plastic bag is a real economic incentive that yields tangible results similar to the booty-to-bench motivation.

Choosing to ignore these proven winners is roughly akin to Bo Ryan ditching his esteemed Swing Offense in favor of some newfangled strategy that does not work. If the city of Madison is serious about curbing the use of plastic bags, it will tap the power of economic incentives to get Madison residents to play for team conservation.

Zachary Schuster ([email protected]) is a graduate student studying water resources engineering and water resource management.