The plastics industry is a microcosm of free market economics. Plastics used to be used in aerospace and life safety because they were light and strong. Then they got so cheap they were used to encase hamburgers. Then the externalities became obvious enough that market forces pushed the big players to stop.

But your teriyaki still comes in one.

Your corner restaurant still uses them.

You still put soup in it at the grocery store. The externalities are irrelevant to small producers that don't face enough consumer pressure to deal with it.

I used to do consulting work. I got to visit landfills on a couple of locations - not the transfer stations most people think are landfills, but the actual place where we bury everything that we have to bury. The second-most striking thing was the giant waste gas incinerators, multi-story monuments whose function it was to take the seeping methane spread across dozens of acres and eliminate it so that it couldn't catch the place on fire or explode. I have photographs and videos somewhere but we're talking cell phone footage from 2003 so they ain't much but here's a good representation:

The most striking thing, however, was the crew of Down's Syndrome guys whose job it was, 40 hours a week, to pick disposable plastic bags off the trees.

It took another 17 years before my state was willing to consider banning plastic bags. They didn't. Because nobody has to go watch the waste of society pick the waste of society out of trees.

The economics of destroying the environment need to be prohibitive before the environment is actually, you know, destroyed. And I think plastics hit too hard and too fast while the world was too fractious for us to ever have had a chance. Every now and then I have flights of fancy where someone engineers a bacterium that eats polystyrene. It would solve our recycling problem forever while also destroying civilization. Definitely a fuck/marry/kill thought experiment.