&gt; Would you describe vandalism as a &quot;market failure&quot;? How about shoplifting? If not, why are they a different problem from littering?<p>Yes. This is exactly why we don&#x27;t expect markets to take care of these issues: instead, we have a public police force.<p>&gt; If there is a problem with plastic bag litter, it is the fault of the litterers, which is a subset of all users of plastic bags. Shifting what should be the liability of the polluters onto the entire population of plastic bag users doesn&#x27;t right any wrong--in my view the wrong is even greater.<p>The problem is that enforcing this liability is somewhere between impractical and impossible. It doesn&#x27;t matter how much ideological sense your proposed solution makes if it can&#x27;t actually be executed.