I'm also freaked out at the amount of wasteful plastic packaging we now allow, apparently without imposing any cost on the companies that create this waste. I go to a lot of effort to facilitate recycling, but it seems like every meal generates at least 3 or four empty plastic containers (plus yet more packaging involved in non-food household, medicinal, and other products).
This excessive use of plastic imposes extraordinary, externalized costs on our environment, since it is much more expensive if not impossible to clean up all the waste and other ill effects of continuing to use plastic. Even if using other forms of packaging would be more expensive, I feel sure that those costs would be far less than the total costs of continuing to use plastic.
Imho, plastic packaging should be banned wherever any other type of container is feasible; and/or at the minimum, manufacturers that insist on continuing to use plastic packaging should be required to pay for the real costs being externalized onto the environment and consumers. While we're at it, we should also require that any of the little plastic rings that are so often used in packaging must me easily breakable, so consumers don't have to spend time cutting them in order to make sure they won't strangle growing turtles or other wildlife.
I've written to my federal representatives about this, with no meaningful response.
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