I argue 90% of that efficiency is an illusion. All the stuff we ship in plastic used to ship in paper boxes. The stuff we buy in plastic bottles used to come in glass bottles with a recycling deposit. Aluminum cans as well. Juice used to come in cans and you had a special little pointy opener for it. All bags used to be paper.
We use plastic for packaging everything because it’s cheap. It’s cheap because the price does not reflect the lifetime cost of the object. If the environmental damage was factored in with a tax, Watch how fast packaging companies would get clever with paper and glass, just like they did before plastic. The world now is not so different that we need plastic everything to get by. Our parents had just as busy and hectic lifestyles as us and didn’t have much that was plastic. I’m old enough to remember milk delivery, and it was better because you didn’t have to go to the store to buy it and we never ran out.
Don’t fall into the trap of looking at the world as it is and seeing that as inevitable. Our addiction to plastic was created by decades of marketing, price fixing, oil industry subsidies and all sorts of things that having nothing to do with actual practical benefits of the material.
