20 years ago:

"We need to stop using paper bags! They’re cutting down all the trees!” (a renewable resource)

"We should use plastic bags instead! They’re recyclable!” (so is paper, and it’s far more economically viable, but plastic is made from petroleum)

So now we use plastic bags made of a much heavier material, so we can reuse them, or cloth bags for a similar reason.

Cloth bags are made from cotton, like paper is made from trees.

Zero plastic doesn’t need to be a goal. There has rarely if ever been a more versatile and useful material. Delivering food and medicine to humanity would be impossible if we all woke up tomorrow without plastic.

So it’s more a case of judicious use:

1. use when no feasible alternative exists (not just because plastic is most convenient)
2. invest in effective recycling and recovery programs, including total incineration - AND (important) make sure the cost of this is shifted upstream to the manufacturers of plastics

There will be many cases where “no feasible alternative exist” and that will mean “it is prohibitively costly to do it with glass and steel.” I think that is really your questions. The answer is yes, sometimes plastic is actually best.

But I’d feel much more comfortable deciding that for a given use case IF #2 actually existed. Under current conditions, there may be no reasonable use of plastic at all.

The real trick to make this better is moving away from a consumerist mindset. Which isnt really possible in capitalism at its current stage.

An oft-overlooked part of this is the fact that it is also a socioeconomic issue. Due to half a century of wage suppression, the diminished purchasing power of the majority of the population would not be able to handle the shift to more durable goods. Wealth/income inequality is a major hurdle for reducing single use plastics and disposable goods.

If you use reusable bags, bottles, and other containers, that’s way more sustainable than any single use product.

But using paper is still better than plastic, and yes, trees can be and are sustainably farmed in many parts of the world.

I have seen some shifts away from plastic. For example, Apple seems to have removed almost all if not all plastic from their packaging, replacing it with paper.

Why are we still using so much fucking plastic?

Capitalism, gotta make that line go up.

Let’s take clothing for example. It’s way easier to say, make a polyester shirt that breaks in a few months in a sweatshop than make a linen shirt that lasts for 20 years.

Now, let’s say that these two shirts have been made and now they are in a store. Someone goes there and chances are that they will take the polyester shirt because it’s cheaper. (also: plastic fibers feel soft at first, but soon become rough and itchy, while natural fibers like linen or cotton are rough at first and become softer with time. For example, the linen clothing I’m wearing right now was very rough and kinda uncomfortable at first but now is soft.)

Another reason is that plastic can be made into nearly any form. Combined with the fact that plastic items are cheaper to make than longer-lasting and/or enviriomentally friendly items, this leads to companies making a lot of plastic items.

I presume costs for most products would creep up

Yes, they would. But the thing is that in a world where items weren’t made of plastic, they would be more durable, especially if we made items to be actually used not just to be sold. Companies don’t care if your new shirt breaks the very next day, all they care is that they got that sweet, sweet money.

And if there were only, say, well-made, durable linen shirts instead of polyester ones sewn up by a Vietnamese child in 50 minutes, they would be way more expensive, yes, but you would need to buy new shirts very rarely. If all shirts could last 20 years, you wouldn’t have to buy that many shirts.

Last but not least, in order to achieve this kind of world, we’d need to let go of the “buy, buy, buy” consumer mentality and replace it with quality over quantity, because chances are that in a world like this, you would have less stuff than you do now. For example, if you look back a couple of centuries, clothing was very valuable. You’d have like, three shirts unless you were really rich, but those shirts would last you decades, assuming you or someone else would mend them and moths wouldn’t find their way to your wardrobe. (of course, with modern farming technology and mechanised spinning and weaving, clothes would still be far less expensive)

So in conclusion: there’s so much plastic shit because it’s cheaper to make plastic shit than actually good products. And yes, prices would go up, and we would need to have less stuff over all, since the amount of stuff we have nowadays is ridiculously unsustainable. Humans have done just fine without single-use plastics for millenia.

The solution isn’t so much to replace plastic as it is to eliminate “single use” from our way of life, except as needed for emergencies (eg, situations where the only way to be sanitary is by destroying the object after use).

If you eliminate the majority of non-reusable stuff from your life, the rest becomes much easier. The volumes of plastics would be much lower such that much of it could actually be recycled at least once.

The second bit is to always incorporate end of life into a product’s lifecycle. Shrink what’s allowed to go in landfills. Provide a system to reclaim and often re-use damaged or worn out materials. Design things so they can be easily parted (broken up into parts) so that if a battery dies, you take the old ones in for servicing and either get them replaced or refreshed, instead of tossing the entire device.

Groceries? I no longer use bags; I get the store to give me the flats it gets its stuff in, and I fill those up with my groceries. General shopping? I have a set of cloth bags that stay in my car and another I can shove in my pocket when I’m walking.

I’ve got a metal water bottle I take with me when I go places.

Rejecting single use will get us much further than rejecting plastic.

This is already being done in Europe to an extent. It is doable, but it requires a shift in thinking and more investment as well as planning. It’s not really about getting rid of plastic. Just single-use plastic.

It’s doable. The world existed and functioned without plastic.

You would see glass for bottles, etc. We would adapt and be fine

OK, with what would you replace the materials of LEGO bricks?

This is not a trick question, but one that LEGO has already spent millions on research on. They found an oil-free alternative to the soft plastic used for leaves and other plant parts, but are stuck on other types of plastic they use.

This is less to do with single-use plastics, but plastic is often a really good option from a functional POV. It doesn’t conduct heat like metal, it doesn’t break like glass/ceramics and has better moisture resistance than timber. (Not saying plastic couldn’t be replaced a lot of the time, but some times it’s a frustratingly good option).

In terms of complete single-use plastic replacement, I’m not sure, but would also be interested. I’d hope it’s mostly possible.

A big issue is the single use. Why do you need a plastic wrapping in the cookies ? if you get cookies at your local bakery, and give them your own bag, they’ll put-it inside, no problem.

Note also, that a lot of things are already ongoing to ban single-use plastic. I am old enough to remember the late 90’s early 00’s when you would get a plastic bag from any shop, these have been outlawed a while ago and nobody miss them

This is a non-trivial problem. The best thing for the environment is for all of us to stop buying so much shit we don’t need, but that would require a dramatic shift in how society works and the cultural values of pretty much everyone. Cookies coming in metal tins again would be way worse for the environment than plastic, but you also have to remember that when cookies came in metal tins, they were luxury items people would buy for holidays and special occasions. The only way to meaningfully improve things for the environment in terms of packaging is for all of us to buy less pre-packaged food in general.

Expanding access to goods is both good and bad, and plastic containers are a big part of that process. I think it’s completely unrealistic to replace all single-use plastics with non-plastic alternatives, and I think that efforts to do so have largely backfired in unexpected ways. This problem is best solved by reducing the amount of useless shit we buy but in the meantime I think biodegradable polymers are a good bridge technology. We actually already know about a lot of biodegradable polymers because the earliest polymers were based on biopolymers such as cellulose, resin, and rubber, and these have remained commercially important enough to maintain a high degree of knowledge of their chemistries.

Another problem, of course, is that most people don’t actually want truly biodegradable polymers. You don’t want a ketchup bottle that starts breaking down while you’re still using it or impacts the taste of the ketchup, but you also don’t want to buy it in a thick, non-squeezable glass bottle. So from an engineering perspective we have to devise plastics that are biodegradable, but only when we want them to be. There are a lot of advancements in this field, but it’s still not enough on its own to fix things. This issue also applies to paper, since almost all “paper” packaging products also include polymers as sealants to improve performance precisely because paper has all the same issues without it.

In the beginning, things would suck, because low prices come from economies of scale, and the petrochemical industry certainly has scale. Once you’ve ramped up glass, paper and metal packaging factories, it should be tolerable.

There are also new materials such as biodegradable plastic and even mycelia. That would be useful.

If we also ramp up various carbon capture technologies, you could technically turn that carbon into plastics, so you won’t need any more oil. Obviously, that wouldn’t solve the climate crisis. You need CCS for that. Probably not going to happen within the next century, but it’s technically possible.

Plastic is not a climate problem. Ocean pollution is mainly fishing nets. There is a garbage problem that automation can help with recycling. Making fishing nets out of cotton instead of nylon would be a big improvment.

Wood and paper is a renewable resource that could be used more. Global warming is especially a threat to vast northern forests with fire that are paper sources, while also permitting more/bigger tree growth in the regions. Harvesting trees is a solution to fires, and more demand an incentive to prevent fires.

Manufacturing with compressed sawdust could be a cost competitive alternative to plastic, but the binder could make the wood product less recyclable.