What if it's actually tremendously efficient to do it this way, in a way that is not inutitive to the layperson? There are many many other uses for oil and polymer and shipping capacity, and the plastic cutlery industry can leverage these incredible economies of scale.
A problem I have with systems of such complexity is that it feels basically unknowable whether or not this is true. It totally may be. On the otherhand, it might just be that we're basically subsidizing an incredibly expansive practice by creating enormous and complex upstream costs that we ignore in our current accounting.
I'm pretty convinced this is less efficient than doing it locally. The issue here is that when you talk efficiency, you need to ignore monetary issues - moeny is exactly the bullshit complexity that makes those things turn out so weird.
So let's talk energy. Does this pipeline - oil from Middle East, through India, through China, to the West and to the ground makes sense? Probably not so much; I doubt the oil extraction and manufacturing scales that well to justify shipping bulk resources halfway around the world. And definitely nothing justifies just throwing the things away after one use.
What makes things less energy-efficient is monetary considerations. The current chain of production is established on monetary efficiency - which is based on labor costs, transportation costs, etc., which all stem from trade deals and political power of different countries.
Comparing what we have with what could be, the real (and too often forgotten) question is: can we do better? The emphasis is on "can". Maybe the current state of affairs represents close to the best we can reasonably achieve from where we are now. I don't know. Which honestly makes me want to throw my hands up in the air and give up. I don't see a simpler solution than "invent free fusion energy", or something.
I remember reading stories several years ago of Scottish prawns being shipped to Thailand to be shelled by hand, and then shipped back for sale in the UK [0]. I have no idea whether this still happens, but I find it utterly mind-blowing that this process was the most efficient way of getting the job done. Globalisation sure does lead to some weirdly counter intuitive outcomes.
It is only efficient because of the tragedy of the commons; The "plastic cutlery industry" can rake in all the profits of the (literal) garbage they produce, but the whole society is left with the cost of disposing it.
One would think that having people pay for the full cost of garbage disposal would steer companies into producing reusable, optimal-duration plastics... but the most likely outcome of this would be a endemic level of littering.
Sometimes the Invisible Hand needs herself a hand.
>The "plastic cutlery industry" can rake in all the profits of the (literal) garbage they produce, but the whole society is left with the cost of disposing it.
Where I live, the one who bought the plastic cutlery throws it into garbage and pays the full cost for the disposal of that garbage.
