Why is single use plastic still used and mass produced if we know how bad it is for the environment

Question

Especially with biodegradable plastic made from cellulose being made available

In: 1

Answer 1

In the real world, decisions are made that have to account for more than a single factor.

Plastic is very useful. In many cases, replacement for plastic consumes a lot more material and labor. There are even cases, when there is no feasible replacement for plastic.

For example, we could consider replacing plastic bottles with glass. Until you run the life cycle analysis and discover that glass requires a lot more energy to produce. Glass is so heavy that the amount of energy used to transport glass containers will offset any fossil fuel use avoided by replacing the plastic with glass. So it sounds really great but it is actually worse for the environment ultimately.

And there we have other competing tradeoffs – do we think it is more important to reduce waste or do we think it is more important to reduce the energy/fossil fuel footprint?

Or perhaps we can talk virtuously about doing without? We could then make it so expensive or infeasible through policy (ban plastic?). This “sounds” great until we notice that this raises the cost of goods or reduce availability of goods so much so that the less wealthy are impacted very negatively. Again a tradeoff.