The plastics industry is a microcosm of free market economics. Plastics used to be used in aerospace and life safety because they were light and strong. Then they got so cheap they were used to encase hamburgers. Then the externalities became obvious enough that market forces pushed the big players to stop. But your teriyaki still comes in one. Your corner restaurant still uses them. You still put soup in it at the grocery store. The externalities are irrelevant to small producers that don't face enough consumer pressure to deal with it. I used to do consulting work. I got to visit landfills on a couple of locations - not the transfer stations most people think are landfills, but the actual place where we bury everything that we have to bury. The second-most striking thing was the giant waste gas incinerators, multi-story monuments whose function it was to take the seeping methane spread across dozens of acres and eliminate it so that it couldn't catch the place on fire or explode. I have photographs and videos somewhere but we're talking cell phone footage from 2003 so they ain't much but here's a good representation: The most striking thing, however, was the crew of Down's Syndrome guys whose job it was, 40 hours a week, to pick disposable plastic bags off the trees. It took another 17 years before my state was willing to consider banning plastic bags. They didn't. Because nobody has to go watch the waste of society pick the waste of society out of trees. The economics of destroying the environment need to be prohibitive before the environment is actually, you know, destroyed. And I think plastics hit too hard and too fast while the world was too fractious for us to ever have had a chance. Every now and then I have flights of fancy where someone engineers a bacterium that eats polystyrene. It would solve our recycling problem forever while also destroying civilization. Definitely a fuck/marry/kill thought experiment.
They are now commercializing plastic-eating mushrooms. Real ones. http://yupthatexists.com/pestalotiopsis-microspora-plastic-eating-mushroom/ Every now and then I have flights of fancy where someone engineers a bacterium that eats polystyrene.
How do we get others to cut out the polystyrene? Every appliance I've ever bought is encased in it. There's got to be a better way to make sure a new TV isn't damaged in it's cardboard box. We haven't managed to ban plastic bags in my state yet either - though all of the supermarkets have decided you'll have to pay to use them now. Then, on the other side of things, deli products are now sold by size (S, M, L) rather than weight in the same grocery stores. They won't allow you to use your own containers anymore. So doing away with plastic bags hasn't really done much to curb plastic use.Then the externalities became obvious enough that market forces pushed the big players to stop.
How do we get people to cut out the polystyrene? Tax the ever-loving shit out of it. How do we deal with the externalities of that? Dunno. I've learned in my dotage that the intractable problems usually have several proposed solutions, all of which have their drawbacks and all of which have their fervent opponents. California attempted to limit the amount of glass waste by putting a deposit on bottles. Then that deposit ended up being appropriated by the legislature. Then to make it harder to reclaim your fees they eliminated everywhere convenient. The west side of Los Angeles has two locations where you can get your deposit back. Whenever you attempt to fuck with the free market, the free market fucks with you double.
Wait, how did they manage to screw up bottle deposits? Us Europeans have been doing those for ages and they seem to work fine. Here in Finland all glass and plastic beverage bottles have deposits, so the recycling rate is really high (and we actually recycle them, not just offload them to some poorer country)
From a larceny standpoint they didn't screw anything up - they take your money and keep it. As a tax it's fine. As an incentive to recycle, closing down the places you can get your deposit back limits the incentive to hold onto your bottles. It doesn't help that Waste Management, the company that gets the recycling contract, is mafia-owned.