What I learned about a plastic-free life

It is amazing. And essential. And has gigantic external costs that either nobody is paying right now or that the government is picking up the bill for. I.e. the true cost is not being priced in

I have been wondering why do some governments ban single-use utensils, straws, shopping bags, but not plastic bottles. They are perfectly replaced by superior (fully recyclable, etc.) glass, and yet not only are they not banned but, in fact, water or drinks in glass are so difficult to find in supermarkets.

There can be an argument that banning avoidable use of plastic would mean more expensive packaging, and unless the government subsidizes it (which it probably does not want to spend money on?) then those costs will be passed to the consumer, so some products may become more expensive. Naturally, some of us could just buy less (and be better off), but 1) some perhaps could not afford it, and 2) general reduction in consumption is supposedly bad for some economy metrics.

A more cynical argument is that there inevitably is a lot of interest from powers that be, invested in oil and plastic, to maintain the status quo and thicker margins.

It seems not that there is no solution, but that there perhaps is not enough motivation to enact one.

> owe their entire existence to plastics

I think that's fundamentally untrustable argument since a very similar one was used to justify slavery. "It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid 'anti-slavery' mentality bandwagon when they probably own their entire existence to slavery and other forms of forced labor. Abolishing slavery will lead to societal collapse."

Just because it's true - much of modern life is utterly dependent on plastics - that doesn't justify a continued high dependency on plastics.

> Everything will get recycled eventually

And we're all dead in the end.

That "eventually" is hiding a lot. Like, what of the plastic in the water. How will that eventually be recycled? What effect does the plastic trash have on sea life, including discarded ("ghost") plastic fishing nets.

Given your indefinite "eventual" time-frame, you'll need to estimate the net future value of continuing with a lot of single-use plastics, vs. that of switching to another solution, where the overall advantages across a century may justify a decade-long expensive transition.

> People in the future will surely find a way to use what's in landfills again.

That's one-sided optimism. Flip it around, and people in the future will surely find a way to eliminate the need for single-use plastic.

> Now you know why plastic replaced glass containers in a majority of applications

We also know the history of "why" depends on cheap petroleum and ignoring the cost of waste management.

Like, we know why Freon (or HCFCs in general) replaced older refrigerants, only later to learn about the high cost due to ozone depletion.

We know the history of why plastic grocery bags mostly replaced paper, but the cost to the store didn't factor in the full cleanup costs or environmental impacts.

How disingenuous. The argument against slavery wasn't that it is economically non-viable and has long term negative consequences. The objection was purely on moral grounds, which should completely supersede economic or environmental factors.

Plastic use should be weighed between harm and gain at each occasion of use. The same just isn't true for slavery, the analogy is terrible. There is appropriate use for plastics, there isn't appropriate use for slavery. You can not discuss both of them in the same manner.

Few practical observations:

- plastic packaging, single use plastic stuff, tend to be mostly needed in cities and cities only. That's simply because in dense cities people keep moving from residential buildings (used less than half a day), to other buildings (offices, commerce etc, also used for less than half a day in mean), in a continuous very short-range commuting, getting continuous non-block-able ads (shop windows), so they tend to eat on the go, buy small stuff they have to carry around etc, also smaller residential emplacements demand small stock at home of anything, so more packaging;

- plastic it's not only packaging, large slice of tissues are plastics, menstruation related products are plastic, electricity cables insulation is plastic, windows joint, many plumbing materials, cars tires and many cars elements, ... are all plastic of some kind.

So to say: we can't being plastic free on scale, simply because when we was it was another era with less humans on earth and much more resources needed for personal wellbeing even if we have had much less back then. Yes, we can have natural fiber dresses, BUT not for anyone, we can make cars without plastics (almost) but they would be much more expensive and energy consuming and so on.

What we can do is AVOIDING living in dense cities, witch is appropriate for many reasons, also to reduce single use plastics. Cities are NOT green at all despite finance capitalism propaganda.