Of course people have an input. You can buy it from someone else who makes it a different way, or not at all.
Using legislation "with teeth" to force something that the masses don't want is autocracy, not democracy.
You can't materialize those alternatives if they don't exist. And, when we're talking about making things in more sustainable ways by emitting less carbon, because carbon externalities aren't accounted for, the sustainable way is more expensive than the dirty way. So, capitalist corporations being the profit maximizing machines that they are, inevitably choose the dirty way.
Then there are the energy inputs to account for.
See also this comment by another user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35630362