This problem won't get fixed without legislation. Single use plastic is cheaper, so of course companies will use that if they can. Most people don't have the income to support "voting with their wallet", and even those who do don't always have the option. IF the best solution out there happens to use single use plastic, you're not going to opt for a worse solution just because it doesn't.
And even if one company cares enough to do something, they will change their tune when they have to start charing more.
The only way this will get better is if the external costs of single use plastic are borne by the companies that make them and consumers are subsidized to absorb the extra cost.
Single use stuff seems easy enough to fix. What seems less obvious to me is what I experienced when shopping for a potty chair for our youngest there were dozens of options at just a single store for a big hunk of plastic that's only useful for a period of months. We ended up not buying one at all.
I had a similar experience the last time I was at CES and was deep into the "South Hall" where there's kiosk after display booth after kiosk of just completely pointless crap of every shape and size. Thousands of practically identical cheap cell phone cases. Thousands of cheap bags and backpacks adorned with battery packs and/or Bluetooth speakers. Each and every booth staffed with multiple people who have to stand there and try to convince you that their big mountain of garbage is somehow special. At the same time as it's astonishingly wasteful and kind of insane when you think about it, it's also completely existentially debasing to the people involved.
If we have a global addiction to anything that seems like it needs fixing, it seems like we're addicted to producing stuff we don't need for problems we don't have just for the sake of doing something.
We've gotten a lot of stuff like this free through Facebook groups
Everybody's got aged-out baby crap taking up space in their house, if you can get them before they get off their ass to throw it out they're usually overjoyed for it to disappear
The way most people in Germany would solve this (we need a potty for some months) is buying it 2nd/3rd/4th hand. Is that not common where you live (I guess USA)?
In the middle class and upward, it's not common, outside of folks who are particularly frugal. The post-WWII American culture is extremely consumerist / materialistic.
It's also that it's just easier to go to Walmart or Target (or Amazon) and buy one and be done with it, than to spend the time hunting around garage sales or thrift stores for something they might not have. Unless you really need to save $10, time is way more valuable than money.
Of course, for immediate-need purchases, nothing beats going to the nearby store or ordering with delivery. But that's not how you handle getting second-hand stuff.
Second-hand stuff is easy to get when you know you need something (or will need it soon), but you're not pressed for time. At any given time, if you look for a second-hand $foo, you may not find it in your area, but there's a good chance you'll find it within a month or two. It's particularly easy with kid stuff - you have ~8 months of advance warning, and most kid items are only used for couple of months, so there's a steady stream of used stuff you can pick from, and a year later, start contributing to, as your kid grows out of their stuff.
What makes second-hand (especially free second-hand) so easy these days is Internet. To start, you want to find and follow three boards for your area: a) Craigslist/Gumtree/equivalent, b) a local giveaway/exchange group, and c) a local "spotted by the side of a trashcan" group. Put stuff you don't need on them, take stuff you need from them, and you're now part of the "reduce, reuse" flow - which is strictly better than "recycle". It doesn't take much time either; following b) and c) is something you do by scrolling through a feed for a minute.
According to Norwegian consumer research, people who save those ten dollars usually spend them on something else (like a travel or another product), so the environmental gain from buying used stuff is not a lot.
Unless people are willing to earn a little less, buttons used is not a solution for an individual’s environmental footprint.
My experience is different. Almost everyone we know gets most of their baby stuff secondhand. They get a bunch of stuff when the baby is born, from older friends with kids. Then they get specific items off NextDoor/Facebook/Craigslist.
I don't know that we'd get a potty used, but we did get used infant bathtubs, which is about the same from a hygienic perspective.
I agree. All of our friends and us get "kids stuff", as well as most of my furniture 2nd hand. My kids are 12 and 14, and outside of certain shoes, they've never worn brand new clothes (same for me and my spouse when we were kids). Why buy when your friends or siblings with older or bigger kids are looking to get rid of clothes as soon as their kids outgrow them? Come to think of it, I don't remember the last time I bought new clothes myself.
I'm in the US and tried donating our child's potty chair. The donation spots I tried refused it because they weren't allowed to take anything which a child has to sit in or on for safety reasons. I even tried Value Village, which is a private second-hand store, and got the same response.
A lot of plastics that we "recycle" end up in landfills anyway. They are not recyclable because they are contaminated with food (need to wash food containers out before recycling) or they are labeled as "recyclable" but really are not, or are not at every recycling center in the nation. The same is true for cardboard like used greasy pizza boxes with cheese stuck to the bottom are not recyclable yet a heck of a lot of people toss them in the cardboard recycle bin.
> The findings confirm the results of a Guardian investigation last year, which revealed that numerous types of plastics are being sent straight to landfill in the wake of China’s crackdown on US recycling exports. Greenpeace’s findings also suggest that numerous products labeled as recyclable in fact have virtually no market as new products.
> She emphasized that bottles and jugs are indeed worth recycling, but said “our findings show that many items commonly found in beach cleanups – cups, bags, trays, plates and cutlery – are not recyclable. In America’s municipal recycling system, they are contaminants.”
> The US recycling economy was upended in 2018 when China enacted bans on imports of most US recycling, leaving recycling companies at a loose end. The report chronicled how dozens of cities – stretching from Erie, Pennsylvania, to San Carlos, California, – have either stopped taking mixed plastics or are sending them to landfill.
> need to wash food containers out before recycling (...) used greasy pizza boxes with cheese stuck to the bottom are not recyclable yet a heck of a lot of people toss them in the cardboard recycle bin.
People are not being informed about it clearly enough. Not that it would change much, except discouraging most people from sorting trash.
Beyond being a significant burden, having individuals washing their trash is just ridiculously inefficient and wasteful in terms of water and energy use, plus it would more than double the amount of detergent unloaded into the return leg of water supply loop. It kind of already defeats the point of recycling.
And that's without even getting to the whole "recycling things other than metal and maybe glass is a scam" thing.
I’m less in the “people need to be informed” camp and more in the “products need to be designed for easy recycling” camp.
If we want to recycle pizza boxes as a society, there needs to be a grease absorbing layer that’s clearly marked for the trash, and a recyclable layer with clear instructions. A great example of this is Siggi’s single serving yogurt cups. The paper label is easily separated from the plastic body, with clear instructions that they’re meant to be separated for recycling into separate streams. In my case my municipality doesn’t recycle the plastic they use (#5 IIRC), but at least the paper and metal foil get recycled.
Expecting end consumers to stay up to date on this stuff is just a way for companies to avoid the responsibility of making better packaging.
To clarify: I'm in your camp too. I just mentioned it because a lot of people don't know that washing recyclable containers before disposing of them is a thing.
> If we want to recycle pizza boxes as a society, there needs to be a grease absorbing layer that’s clearly marked for the trash, and a recyclable layer with clear instructions.
Agreed. And this needs to be built into the packaging, and not be a flimsy piece of paper the restaurant inserts so that the pizza itself doesn't stick to the box.
> A great example of this is Siggi’s single serving yogurt cups. The paper label is easily separated from the plastic body, with clear instructions that they’re meant to be separated for recycling into separate streams.
I've seen this trend and I like it. Paper label being separable also makes it easier to clean and reuse the cup itself. Containers from the yogurt brand we buy can survive a trip through a dishwasher, which helps. Unfortunately, most recyclable plastic containers are not like that.
> Expecting end consumers to stay up to date on this stuff is just a way for companies to avoid the responsibility of making better packaging.
Exactly. Plus, in this case, it's extremely wasteful.
I also blame the packaging problem on advertising/marketing being the cancer of modern society. Notice how professional equipment tends to come in simple cardboard boxes. None of the triple-layered plastic/paper/plastic + paint non-recyclable bullshit. Just straight cardboard and some anti-shock padding.
Companies need to start paying up front for end-of-life management of their products and packaging. It's the most market-friendly way to align incentives on the topic.
Exactly. I’m not likely to see spending hot water, soap, and time cleaning my trash as a sensible use of resources. If plastics need to be clean for recycling, they’re not realistically recycled.
A better solution for pizza boxes is an industrial composting collection that can take all food scraps and food soiled paper products. instead of adding something that may end up plastic or wax coated trash, we can reduce materials used and "recycle" in a different way.
Even if that would be effective, it is not practical to ask people to "chop up" their heavy plastic items just to throw them away. That requires tools, light skill, and time, that not everyone is able or willing to commit to the cause.
Think!. To recycle plastic it must be as clean as new plastic and of the same type of plastic. It then needs to be processed into granular pills of the same.This may mean mixing and melting and adding color to a standard color - usually tending towards brownish = used for hidden or structural parts where color does not matter. You can not have any fiber or fiberglass reinforced plastic in the mix - a little ruins the batch. All this costs $$, usually more cost than new material.
The only way to drive this is to add an input cost(refundable deposit or tax) to plastic when made or imported - to pay for the sorting and recycling. It makes sense - works with glass beer bottles, but plastics beer soda bottles etc usually have too much grunge to economically clean to the needs of recyclers.
We may have to throw away the false economy of plastic by adding a realistic tax/deposit...
This has eliminated much recycling.
I've gone through three potties and never bought or sold any (we got them for free and then gave them away).
Most of our baby stuff comes (and goes) that way. We rarely bought baby stuff at all except for consumables (and even those we gave away when we didn't use them all up, like diapers).
The big issue is that it requires a social circle of people also having kids that are slightly older and younger, and for a lot of people in bigger cities, it's hard for them to build those circles.
There are online forums that help (non-sarcistic Thanks Facebook!) but it's a lot easier if you have a wide social circle already.
I love how in NZ each town have “play centers” - basically hybrid between daycare and playground where parents join and maintain. You are always there to be with your child, tho I’m sure someone would take care for them if you need to run errand for 1 hour. This forms very healthy community of people and friends and trades like above happen. Toys, clothes, car seats - we got it all free…
We do have some friends who were asking “is this newish?” when gifting some item, so not everyone is on zero waste bandwagon.
And by the way, govs should promote zero waste movement way more. Probably starting adopting it themselves.
I was working with a guy from Israel and he asked why the cuffs of my jeans were turned up. I said because I bought them used and they were a little long. He was aghast that I would wear someone else's pants. I was like, "Dude, they're 1/3rd the price of new jeans and they're already worn in, and they are washed!"
I have another friend that would never buy a used car. He's convinced all used cars were totaled and are a scam, despite the fact it is all I've ever owned and they've been fine.
Something about being "used" really freaks some people out. It's this weird purity thing, I dunno.
There is a vibrant 2nd hand resale market in the US, mostly fueled by Facebook marketplace and a handful of specialized apps.
However, Americans in general just don't take good care of stuff. Combined with products being designed from the cheapest possible materials, the quality of second hand goods isn't great. People avoid it if they can afford to buy new.
The problem with 2nd hand is convenience. Maybe I can save a few bucks browsing eBay etc. but it’s not worth the time spent compared to ordering new. I hate doing it though.
If you just happen to need a potty now, then browsing is a lot of work.
If you know "oh, we will need larger cloths and a potty and some toys soon and that bed will be to small in a bit" you can monitor relevant sites on the side and see when the opportunity comes up.
Not to mention the social circle with parents a bit older and a bit younger. "Hey, we don't need this anymore. Do you?" - "oh it's a bit early, but I take it already thanks!"
I've lived in the US and now live in Germany, and cannot cosign to this comment. eBay Kleinanzeigen is full of scams, and the side effect of people hanging on to stuff until it breaks is that most of the stuff on the classifieds is half-broken crap that they just want to get rid of. So if people can afford to buy new, they do buy new.
The hidden lede is that Germans are not as rich as some would believe, with fairly low salaries, high home prices and high taxes, and a low level of wealth compared to GDP. Much of the German wealth is held by heirs of big dinosaur companies.
This happens where I am at in the US. Our family and friends pass children's items and clothes around. The same clothing item may have left and returned to us multiple times.
When we are talking about plastic ending up in the oceans we also must not forget about fishing gear and everything related. This is making almost 50% of all plastic in the ocean.
A handful of items are difficult to get second-hand commercially for either safety or hygiene reasons. But we both bought and sold tons of stuff through local consignment stores.
> it's also completely existentially debasing to the people involved.
Wow, the privilege wrapped up in that statement. Do you think it’s existentially fulfilling to clean public toilets? To drive a bus? To bottle alcohol?
The things you mentioned, clean toilets, bus rides, alcohol are actually things people want. Trying to push something that no one wants or needs is kind of debasing. I agree with OP that we seem to have created a consumer mentality, "shopping therapy", that is sad to be a part of — either as the consumer or the producer. Never mind what it does to the planet as well.
I absolutely do not. But unlike driving a bus or cleaning a public toilet are at least socially useful, and those people should be cherished in society for the work they do and the service they provide. Being a "rep" for a pile of completely forgettable plastic pre-garbage is both debasing and utterly pointless.
> Most people don't have the income to support "voting with their wallet", and even those who do don't always have the option.
I am old enough to remember when there was practically no plastic in food packaging. Twinkies and its ilk were more or less the exception (and fine examples they were of that exception!).
No doubt many remember glass ketchup bottles, glass mustard jars, glass peanut butter jars, glass mayonnaise jars... I swore to continue to buy only glass condiment jars but they no longer exist. I think the exception now is jams and jellies still come in glass jars. Honey too if you look for it.
Cereal? No plastic bag liner, it was wax paper or that weird paper foil stuff that Super Sugar Crisp came in.
I'd love to go back to glass, wax paper, but there just isn't any options any longer.
Is it more ecological to use glass instead of plastic?
With plastic there is trash to deal with, but glass is heavier thus will take more energy to deal with logistically. Recycling is not energy free either, and there is plenty of loss to deal with there. Plastic is very cheap to manufacture partly because its manufacture is so easy.
And right now it seems like energy consumption is a far larger worry than trash at the ecological level.
I don't have the studies at hand, but the answer is a big "it depends"
If you have local production and re-use of glass it can be more energy efficient to use the more heavy glass. The further the transport, the worse it becomes.
But there is a second factor to it, besides energy use: microplastics are a problem and most plastics can only be used for "energetic usage" - being burned in a power plant, which causes probelmatic gases needing filtering and then disposal of those filters ... re-use of broken glass is elementary in glass production and even if not recycled less of a problem for the environment.
Right but is your family an outlier or an average? Anecdotes are not evidence, and what matters is how everything would pan out in the real world.
When we were using glass jars for everything, it's not like glass jars were not actively being produced. I don't think these are unanswerable questions but i highly doubt it's as simple as "replace plastic with glass". Aluminum may be a better solution, one that doesn't use up a lot of sand, for example.
Also, we really, really need legislation to stop the ridiculousness of over-packaging. The other day I bought some case screws for my PC and they came in a goddamn "nice" foam-padded plastic case. That plastic case was then inside plastic wrap, then some plastic bubble wrap, and then a plastic Amazon mailer. That was completely unnecessary. The screws could have been in a recycled paper packet and thrown into a simple tiny cardboard box and it would have been fine.
You also have to think in terms of actual harm. Considering the US has an absurd amount of junk land it can use for landfills, a single use plastic object that has 1/1000 the carbon emissions of the reusable alternative may be the best environmental choice.
I'm surprised every time I hear the concept of "land fill" in conjunction with trash. As if the natural thing to do with waste is... put it in a hole in the ground? It feels like some 50's conception of environment policy to me. Shouldn't things be either recycled as much as possible, and the rest incinerated for energy?
That’s the problem though isn’t it. Assuming trash will never be without electronics, batteries etc, it will end up in water. As far as I understand, burning in decent facilities should keep most nasty stuff out of the atmosphere and ground water (e.g heavy metals)
Since the late 80's, American landfills are required to be lined and equipped with water treatment facilities to preven groundwater contamination. Doesn't completely eliminate the risk of course.
That's how nature have dealt with trash for as long as earth has existed.
Landfills are "holes in the ground", I won't deny it. But a lot is happening in these holes, will all sorts of microorganisms breaking down stuff. Well managed landfills try to minimise impact to the environment with that knowledge.
In an oversimplified way, our landfills are putting oil back where it came from. Recycling and incineration are good too, but so are well managed landfills. It all depends on the situation/materials/...
It's not lifeless. You can look it up but it's more fun to go out and see it for yourself. The desert out there is quite beautiful and there are loads of critters.
You could restrict yourself to dry lake beds that don't flood in winter, which are nearly as lifeless as Mars, and still have enough landfill area for centuries of waste.
The average American produces 3.5 pounds of trash per day at an average one third of a gram per cubic centimeter. Assuming that holds steady, and we use a normal landfill depth of 400 feet, and the US population doubles over the next century, we need a landfill area of 250 square miles to cover us for the next hundred years.
4767 x 75 x 365 = I get 130,500,000 cm³/person/lifetime. You got 130,000,000,000,000,000.
There are 10¹⁵ cubic centimetres in a cubic kilometre, not 10⁶. I think all your numbers are for m³, not km³, a factor of a billion out, so your final figure should be 39 km³.
Anywhere outside of a city centre, according to many. I live in a rural area. People drive out here from the city to dump their old appliances in the forests of this “junk land”. Almost every road corner has a pile of refrigerators and washing machines next to it. My current refrigerator was rescued from one of these impromptu landfills. Nothing at all wrong with it, just five years old, so it’s trash.
Just because you can’t see it, just because it doesn’t have value to property developers, does not make it junk.
I mean, by this logic, we should just dump our trash in the “junk water” which covers much of the planet.
I don't know why you decided someone saying the US has plenty of junk land must be talking about your home. I was referring to dry salt flats, abandoned strip mines, and the like. The vast amounts of space under major cities would also make good landfill volume.
Because the entire idea that land can be junk leads to a rapid broadening of the definition of junk. Your NIMBY attitude of “out of sight, out of mind” is exactly how we ended up in this mess in the first place.
> a single use plastic object that has 1/1000 the carbon emissions of the reusable alternative may be the best environmental choice.
Is there any data that single use stuff (of any kind) creates less carbon emissions? I would expect it to be the other way around, except for some edge cases.
There's plenty of data. For example, producing single-use plastic grocery bags uses such a trivial amount of energy and resources that it almost doesn't matter—thousands and thousands of times less than an equivalent cotton bag. The bigger problem is disposal. If single-use plastics can be safely sequestered in landfills, that's a mostly solved problem, but that isn't always the case.
But isn’t the way the disposable plastic bags are so cheap actually one of the sneaky ways they are bad? It’s definitely not good for the environment but is a hard to break out or local minima.
I seem to remember that paper bags are close to single-use plastic bags, but still use more energy to produce and also require wood pulp. Paper bags can easily be recycled, but "single-use" plastic bags can easily be re-used as household trash bags, or otherwise. So it's a toss-up.
This is exactly what I've been doing since moving to Austin.
I get paper bags at the grocery and throw them out immediately after a single use, and now I have to also buy plastic garbage bags for under the sink, which I never used to do.
I mean, I disagree with both of those statements entirely. Do you have any sources? I do, but not googling at the moment.
EDIT: quick Google search has many sources listing paper degrading in 2-6 weeks in landfills. Plastic in the ocean… I think you need to b by broaden your horizons if you think that doesn’t happen
You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.
And I'm not saying decomposition doesn't happen at all in landfills; it very clearly does, but the sort of decomposition that takes place is incomplete and slow, because landfills aren't ideal places for decomposition to occur. But that doesn't matter. Once it's buried, who cares if it takes 300 years to decompose?
> You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.
I think that enough people don't give a shit about where their waste goes, that any coastal community will lose a fraction of its waste to the drink. That isn't where most of the plastic in the ocean comes from, but the difference between "should" and "inevitably won't" is vast.
Paper degrades if it is near the surface, mixed with loose dirt, and still getting oxygen. If it's packed down under feet of compacted soil and other trash it degrades much more slowly.
It depends entirely on the content of the waste and the levels of moisture and air infiltration.
Some landfills are known to generate huge amounts of methane, and ooze black sludge at the surface. This famously occured after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.
In contrast, landfills in arid places can preserve trash like a museum:
Yes, mostly because of the energy used in their creation. For example you have to reuse a cotton grocery bag 7100 times before you break even with plastic bags for carbon footprint.
You have not read the document that you link. Else, you would have noticed that it states that a not-organic cotton bag has to be reused 52 times for the same relative impact on climate change. The 7100 is impact on ozone depletion:
p. 18: 'Conversely, for composite and cotton
the very high number of reuse times is given by the ozone depletion impact alone. Without considering
ozone depletion, the number of reuse times ranges from 50 to 1400 for conventional cotton, from 150 to
3800 for organic cotton, and from 0 to 740 for the composite material bag. The highest number is due to
the use of water resource, but also to freshwater and terrestrial eutrophication'.
And as I have commented elsewhere: I have cotton bags that I have easily used 500 times. If I had used an old T-shirt for the bag or later use the old bag for cleaning purposes, the 7,100 becomes very relative.
Aren't the plastic bags mainly a problem because they tend to end up in places where they don't belong at all, like oceans etc.? They can't really decompose or anything like that, they just shred to tiny little pieces that mess with animals (and ultimately also our) digestion, no?
Yup. There are places where plastic bags accumulate. Once it was my doorstep. Every morning there were piles of plastic bags that were delivered to my house.
Just take a trip along any river or stream near a town and you’ll find them swimming by like lifeless jellyfish
The Reason Foundation (which is slightly right leaning of center, but makes its case using actual studies and facts) has a great explainer on how plastic bag bans for example hurt the environment more than help and cost consumers (including low income individuals) an extra $1b/yr: https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/california_plast...
But there’s basically no reasonable way to say that single use plastic is good for the environment. They are clearly a local minima that has seemed tricky for the market to break out of. Unless they make a case that that single use bags are actually the global minima or the global minima is just not worth it, the reason foundation is being rather myoptic when presenting why people attempts to get out of the local minima are bad.
Reason is a libertarian think tank. Describing them as “slightly right leaning of center” is really sugarcoating things - their whole raison d’etre is coming up with arguments to oppose virtually any and all government regulations. That doesn’t make them wrong necessarily, but let’s call a spade a spade.
Does the US still operate landfills? Some or all EU countries have completely abandoned the practice. So that's just not a harm that matters, unlike some other ones.
In any case, it'd be compounding the problem here, and rather bad economics at the same time. Plastics aren't that hard to collect/separate, especially if it's ok to be mixed with paper. They burn readily and, given high temperatures, cleanly, allowing the recuperation of a significant fraction of its energy content.
Then, there's recycling, of course. Not always possible, but not entirely impossible, either.
“In 2018, 24% of all municipal waste generated in the EU was landfilled.” That said, incineration is a similar option that drastically lowers volume of waste, but still produced ash that ends up buried and vast amounts of CO2.
That’s extremely misleading Germany simply uses incinerators before dumping the ash in landfills.
“One nation now grappling with the legacy of its long embrace of incineration is Denmark. The country, one of Europe’s biggest waste producers, built so many incinerators that by 2018 it was importing a million tons of trash.”
>>Some or all EU countries have completely abandoned the practice.
Absolutely not true, glad you maybe live in a country where landfills are disappearing, but they will always exist in some form - even with burning where do you think the slag goes to? That's right, a normal landfill. Not everything can be burnt, and not everything can be recycled.
And definitely not "all" EU countries - Poland has normal landfills that take everything still, very few operational waste incenerators, and recycling is still unknown to a lot of people.
It's "just" carbohydrates - in theory it's no worse than burning oil or gas for heating/electricity, if you make sure everything burns at high enough temperature to burn cleanly and have filters at the exhaust to catch anything that survived the processes.
I'd say it's a positive, we use oil to produce plastics, if that oil is used to produce energy after its plastic form is no longer needed....that's a plus in my book. But maybe on the other hand it's better if it stays in the landfill instead of being burnt and releasing the bound carbon into the atmosphere.
A modern plant turns plastic into CO_2, electricity, and, often, residential heat. So, yes, that's preferable. Among the sheer ugliness and wastefulness of landfills, burning at high temperature avoids the toxic intermediates plastics give off when degrading in nature, which landfills struggle to contain.
Ash is, by definition, inert. It is the remaining mass that does not chemically react even under extreme heat. It therefore also does not interact with, for example, the human body. Plastics are all carbon/hydrogen/nitrogen/oxygen, and, to a first approximation, do not leave any ash. In reality they do, but it's extremely little and harmless.
(Physical harms can survive an incinerator, such as material giving off radiation, but those should never be in the trash)
I cannot put a source to it but I remeber to have heard the ash landfills (that are hermetically sealed) are designed to be resource deposites once they are full. It does not make sense to recycle the involved metals etc. while its almost empty but should be worthwile once a large deposite is established.
From a C02 perspective, if it's burned cleanly and the energy released is used to generate electricity or heat homes, it's really not much different than a natural gas plant. But I agree with your point.
What if single use uses less energy in many cases? Washing uses a lot of power and glass is heavy, using more fuel in transit. Paper is renewable and can often replace plastic, but not always.
If plastics is recycled, it would have a better ecologic balance. Exchanging it with paper will also damage the environment further. It is only better if the plastic remains in the environment.
The problem is food packaging. Even if you use paper here, it often is coated with plastic anyway, any diary product for example.
And even if one company cares enough to do something, they will change their tune when they have to start charing more.
The only way this will get better is if the external costs of single use plastic are borne by the companies that make them and consumers are subsidized to absorb the extra cost.