You're putting the tote bag in your bag.
I watched you do it. The canvas one, the one from the bookshop or the farmers market, the one that says something earnest about local produce. You're slipping it into your handbag before you leave, and there's a tiny moment — you probably don't even notice it anymore — where something releases. A small exhale. The feeling of being prepared. Of being the kind of person who remembers.
The tote bag helps. I want to be clear about that. Cotton biodegrades. Plastic doesn't. Every time you use that bag instead of taking a new one, you're keeping plastic out of the world. This is true. This matters.
And still — that exhale. That's what I want to talk about.
I have four tote bags. One lives in the car, one by the door, two more somewhere probably. I'm not sure I've ever used the same one twice in a row, which means I own enough bags to save bags, but not enough organisation to actually do it. And every time I grab one, there's that small release. That feeling of okayness.
You and me both.
Here's what we already know, or think we know: greenwashing is bad, labels mislead, the gap between what we say we want and what we actually buy is embarrassing and persistent. About 65% of consumers say they want to buy from sustainable brands; roughly 26% actually do.1 We've called this the attitude-behaviour gap for decades now. We've written think pieces about it. We've blamed information asymmetry, consumer confusion, corporate deception.
We've assumed the problem is that people are being fooled.
But what if we weren't fooled? What if we were collaborating?
In 2015, researchers Uma R. Karmarkar and Bryan Bollinger analysed 936,232 loyalty-card purchases by 5,987 households at a large grocery chain in California.2 They wanted to know what happened when shoppers brought their own bags. The answer was strange.
People who brought bags bought more organic products — 13% more, on average. Good news.
They also bought more indulgent products. Ice cream. Chips. Cookies. The bag gave them permission.
The researchers called it moral licensing. Do one good thing, earn the right to do a less-good thing. The mechanism isn't complicated. It's the same logic as the gym-then-burger, the salad-then-dessert. We keep a kind of internal ledger, and a deposit in the virtue column frees up a withdrawal elsewhere.
But here's where it gets interesting, and babe, this is the part that changes everything. The researchers ran a second condition. What happened when the store required bags — when bringing your own wasn't a choice but a rule?
The licensing effect disappeared.2
No increase in indulgent purchases. No ice cream bump. The bag still reduced plastic use, but it stopped generating moral credit. As researcher Bryan Bollinger explained, the licensing effect vanished when bags were required — you only indulge yourself when you're the one who chose to bring the bag.3
Stay with me.
The permission slip only works when the virtue is chosen. Mandatory compliance doesn't create moral credit. You don't get to feel good about something you were required to do. The exhale — that tiny moment of okayness — only happens when you could have done otherwise.
Which means the architecture of voluntary eco-certification isn't a bug. It's the product.
I'm going to call this the Permission Slip Economy. You can spot it whenever the purchase feels complete before you've done anything — when the badge is the reward, not the beginning. The opt-in checkbox, the leaf icon, the "sustainable materials" tab. These aren't failing to change behaviour. They're succeeding at something else: keeping you feeling okay about yourself while the cart fills up.
And here's the thing that makes it worse: the badge doesn't need to be fake. The mechanism works even when the virtue is real.
A 2020 study made this clearer.4 Researchers gave participants a choice between towels: one organic cotton, one conventional. Then they measured willingness to pay for a second attribute — fair manufacturing, certified by the Fair Wear Foundation.
The organic label reduced willingness to pay for fair labour by 30%.4
The organic credential didn't add to the ethical account. It completed it. Transaction closed. Ledger balanced.
Subsequent donation rates dropped too — from 72% to 56%.4 One good act, and the appetite for another shrank.
The kicker? When the researchers made the choice feel random — assigning towels by lottery rather than letting participants choose — the licensing effect vanished.4 Just like with the mandatory bags. The permission slip requires self-attribution. You have to feel like you earned it.
Now, I could tell you that labels are useless, that nothing matters, that we should all give up. I'm not going to, because that's not what the evidence says.
Eco-labels do provide information. Without them, consumers have no way to distinguish sustainable products from unsustainable ones. The labels may be imperfect, but they're better than nothing. Markets need signals. This is the best defence, and it's not wrong.
But if the function were purely informational, mandatory labels would work just as well — better, actually, because they'd cover more products. The insistence on voluntariness reveals the psychological function. The information argument explains why labels exist. It doesn't explain why they need to feel like a choice.
Look at the UK plastic bag charge. In England, WRAP reported that major retailers issued 7.6 billion single-use carrier bags in calendar year 2014 (before the 5p charge began in 2015–16). By 2023–24, the main retailers sold 79 million — a reduction of over 98% versus 2014.5
Mandatory works. Mandatory works spectacularly.
It just doesn't feel good. You don't feel particularly virtuous when you pay 5p for a bag you forgot. You feel annoyed. That's the point.
The Permission Slip Economy depends on virtue feeling optional. The moment virtue becomes required, the psychological function collapses and only the environmental function remains. Which, let's be honest, is what we said we wanted all along.
The regulators are catching up. On 27 June 2024, Germany's Federal Court of Justice (BGH) held that "klimaneutral" is an ambiguous environmental term and must be explained within the advert to avoid misleading consumers.6 The EU's Empowering Consumers Directive applies from 27 September 2026 and will treat as misleading claims (e.g. "carbon neutral") that a product has a neutral/reduced/positive greenhouse-gas impact when that claim is based on offsetting.7 Even ClimatePartner, one of the largest certification providers, withdrew its "climate neutral" label in 2023.8
The permission slip is losing its validity. The question is whether we'll replace it with something that actually works, or just find a new badge.
So where does that leave us? Somewhere uncomfortable, which is usually where the truth lives.
We weren't fooled. We were collaborating. Nobody forced us to buy into the exhale. We wanted it — the feeling of being okay, the permission to keep shopping without losing ourselves. And they wanted to sell it.
The tote bag helps. This is true. AND we're using it to buy permission. Both things are true.
The complicity isn't that you were deceived into thinking cotton saves the planet. The complicity is that you don't really care about the maths. You care about the exhale. The feeling of being the kind of person who remembers.
Same here.
But here's what I keep coming back to: the UK bag charge worked. Mandatory compliance — the kind that doesn't feel good, that doesn't generate virtue credits, that just quietly changes behaviour — reduced plastic bag use by 98%. The intervention that removed the moral reward was the intervention that worked.
Which means the question isn't "how do I shop more virtuously?" It's "why am I still performing virtue when I could be supporting systems that don't require the performance?"
The tote bag in your bag is real. The good it does is real. And the permission slip it writes is also real.
Maybe we can stop performing now. Not because nothing matters — because the performance was never the thing that mattered. The systems that work don't ask for your self-image as payment. They just work.
That's it. That's all I've got.