I sympathize with your concern about the ecological impact of plastics; I also think you vastly underestimate the beneficial effects of plastics. Plastics are incredibly useful materials. There's no going back.
there were, are and will be alternatives. we won't go back but we evolve. plastics ruin taste and they feel bad. people's senses are just a "bit fucked up" due to the many "other" things in water, air, soil, drinks and food.
The alternatives were for the most part replaced with plastic because of plastic's remarkable qualities. There's very few relatively inert materials that are cheap to manufacturer, durable, light, can withstand (reasonably) high temperatures, can be formed into whatever shape you want, and can be as hard or flexible as you want.
Glass bottles used to be much more common but they're more expensive, very easy to break, and heavier, which also increases cost of transportation. Paper containers for things can't be allowed to get wet which often makes them impractical. Metals are expensive, potentially reactive, heavy, and inflexible.
Yes plastics are very environmentally problematic, but they do solve a lot of problems that aren't really solved by any other kind of material.
The following are assumptions based on vague memories from books, articles, documentaries, anecdotes and thinking based on observations of past and current events and economic methods. You'd have to consult historians and engineers to confirm.
The choice was a purely pseudo-economic one.
a) Alternatives needed less than 12 months longer R&D.
b) Alternatives were less than 5% more expensive.
c) Alternatives were reusable/repairable and would not have been single-use, which would have reduced production mid- and long-term.
d) Alternatives would have sparked more industries and would have created more jobs, more captains and more (metaphorical) ships,
especially in engineering and crafts.
e) Alternatives would have meant better production methods and waste that would be easier and more constructive to handle, which would have meant better health and a more thriving environment and natural produce, which would have meant less opportunity to study negative impacts on humans as well as flora and fauna and less opportunity to make all kinds of swarms dependent on corporate "solutions".
Again, alternatives would have sparked more industries and would have boosted our civilization's/colony's R&D by 50 or more years. And the resulting cumulative competition would have boosted R&D even further. More money overall, less of gap between the wealthiest and the rest.
Pretending that the growing populations required unhealthy factory jobs is thus irrational. People were keen to learn and work and thrive and even dimwits like me had enough brains to catch up within a few months or years.
The conventional argument "do we create jobs now or later" is nonsense, as more emerging industries would have meant at least just as many jobs.
I could probably use an LLM and some books to craft a much better and technical answer but I probably won't use any for at least some longer while.
Single use plastics are convenient, are 99% of the problem, and could be phased out feasibly. Perfect is the enemy is good. Not pointing fingers at anyone in particular, but people arguing with absolutism on plastics is a dead end.
Never going to happen. People already hate paper straws. No one is going to look at the current replacements and say "Yeah life was better after that" besides activists.
Do they really hate them or do they just complain about them like some bad season of some series they will continue to watch anyway?
Life is better without plastic straws and plastic plates and plastic knifes and so on ... and people who don't care usually care but the brain structure to admit that is premature.
In the same vein, no one hates them unless they didn't grow up with them. If you'd have grown up with glass straws, you'd love glass straws, especially if you'd been brought up being taught about the harms of single use plastics.
99% of these things are entirely cultural and habitual.
I doubt that anyone would prefer a glass or any other hard material straw, straws made out of hard materials are just bad. And I say that as someone who was very enthusiastic about getting steel straws until about the forth or fifth time I nearly broke a tooth on them.
Im not biting down on straws, when putting it into your mouth you aren't holding a straw with multiple fingers like a utensil and it can tap into teeth with the entire weight of the glass and drink behind it because it is not really secured well and it moves. A plastic or paper or silicon or even a bamboo straw its not such a problem because teeth are harder and dig into or bend the material. Glass and steel don't do that and are the equivalent of tapping a tooth with a tiny hammer.
Glass and steel straws sound nice on paper, but using them is a whole different ball game.
I live in a first world G20 country with a greater life expectancy than the US.
In 60 years I don't recall ever seeing a single apple wrapped in plastic in a store.
I have seen a plastic bag of apples pre selected weighed and ready to be grabbed .. but most apples are loose and you bag them yourself picking as many of the ones you want individually.
"how many apples are thrown away" is not just a question of personal responsibility and brains but how the public was "raised" over generations of mass production and cheap methods.
"even" in Germany ( I don't know why I keep saying this ), and in upper class super markets, fresh produce rots much quicker than anything we produce in our gardens. mid-priced frozen stuff triggers unhealthy/gassy reactions in stomach and guts that are not triggered by higher-priced frozen stuff but again, the crowd doesn't care because it was raised that way or does not know.
cheap liquor produce triggers worse reactions in body and brain, short-, mid- and long-term because the production methods are not as clean because producers are OK with the negative outcomes because they were raised to believe that their customers are "fucking stupid".
I understand much of your rambling, but the wax that's sprayed on apples isn't an issue. To the contrary, it increases the shelf life of them, reducing waste. And it's not dangerous either, so pouncing on that particular detail isn't furthering your cause..
