The question sounds hyper stupid but hear me out.
We have an underwhelming volume of shit that relies on plastic. Plastic is cheap and versatile. If we replaced the vast majority of it, I presume costs for most products would creep up, and we would also shift our demand for natural resources (such as wood for paper ). Are there enough resources to sustainably replace our current volume of single use plastics? Or would we be sentencing all of our remaining forests to extinction if we did? Would products remain roughly equally affordable?
Let’s imagine we replace, overnight, all single use plastic in this hypothetical scenario with an alternative. All parcels are now mailed in paper; waxed paper if you need humidity resistance. Styrofoam pebbles are now paper shreds and cardboard clusters. No more plastic film, anywhere. No more plastic bags, only paper. No more plastic wrapping for any cookies confectionery, etc; it’s paper and thin boxes like those of cereals. Toothbrushes, pens, and a variety of miscellaneous items are now made of wood, cardboard, glass, metal, etc. The list goes on, but you get the idea.
Is this actually doable? Or is there another reason besides plastic companies not wanting to run out of business that we haven’t done this already? Why are we still using so much fucking plastic?
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.
Exactly. Outside of, medical supplies that have to be single-use and can’t be made of any other material, there is nothing that has to be made of plastic.