It happened just before Thanksgiving, around the same time as the demise of that other indestructible American bounty, the Hostess Twinkie: the town of Brookline voted to ban the use of Styrofoam for takeout food containers and beverages. The local TV news was all over it, revealing the cultural fissures of sustainability – interviewing customers outside Dunkin’ Donuts (but not Starbucks, which dispenses drinks in recycled paper cups). Most with steaming cups of coffee in hand scoffed – here goes the famously progressive community, trying to regulate our lives. Government, hands off our coffee cups! The talk-radio jokes were easily anticipated. Maybe every resident should get a standard-issue re-usable cup. If you drive into Brookline from Boston with Styrofoam in the cup holder, could you be pulled over for carrying contraband? And what are you doing driving and not taking the T, anyway?
What could be next? Plastic grocery bags? Actually, yes. That topic is already being considered for another town meeting in the near future – though these days, forbidding disposable non-compostable sacks is hardly original. Many a supermarket shopper clambers out of a Prius with canvas tote bags already.
A ban on polystyrene food and beverage containers was first passed by Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1990. That served as inspiration for Brookline, and is part of the hoped-for viral nature of these initiatives: one town does it, and the next one over adopts it as well.
The ban got me thinking about local governments and sustainability, and what economists refer to as spillovers – externalities that cross boundaries in terms of impact. A classic case is the factory smokestack in one jurisdiction spewing pollution that drifts over to neighboring communities. The concept is especially relevant in what has been described as the ultimate externality: climate change. Let’s say one city or town – or even a region or an entire state, such as California – adopts climate action plans that require reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, but the city or state next door does not. In that case, there’s an unequal distribution of costs – but everyone benefits, creating an incentive for others to be "free riders" on the efforts of a few.
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