Task

Plastic pollution is now visible from riverbanks to ocean trenches, and there is little agreement about who should be held accountable for it. While individual choices clearly matter, I would argue that governments carry the greater share of the responsibility, because only they can change the conditions under which those choices are made. The case for individual responsibility is straightforward. Consumers decide what to buy, and demand for heavily packaged goods is what makes producing them profitable in the first place. If shoppers consistently refused single-use bottles and bags, manufacturers would have a commercial reason to abandon them. Small habits, repeated across millions of households, also add up: refusing a plastic straw is trivial in isolation but significant at national scale. Nevertheless, this argument overstates how free those decisions really are. A shopper cannot buy unpackaged rice if no shop stocks it, and recycling carefully achieves very little if the local authority sends every bin to the same landfill. Individuals are choosing from a menu that somebody else has written. Governments, by contrast, write that menu: they can tax virgin plastic, mandate refill schemes, and require packaging to be genuinely recyclable. When Ireland introduced a levy on plastic bags, usage fell dramatically within months — a shift that decades of public appeals had failed to produce. In my view, the two are not really in competition, but they are not equal either. Consumer pressure signals what is acceptable; regulation determines what is available. Since the second constrains the first, the state must act before individual willingness can translate into measurable change. Ultimately, asking citizens to solve plastic pollution through shopping habits alone places the burden on those with the least power to shift the system.