It’s not just policy. We as a society would have to fundamentally all change the way we view convenience and everything being easily available all the time as a good thing.

It reminds me of the time we got “biodegradable” Styrofoam cups at work. People kept commenting on how fragile they were. You’d go to press a lid over the top and they’d just crumple right there and then under the pressure. Coworkers were always commenting that they must be defective and asking why biodegradable stuff is always crap. It said it right on the cups! They’re biodegradable. They break down faster than regular Styrofoam. That’s the whole point!

The reasons plastic and Styrofoam are so useful is the exact same qualities that make them terrible for the environment. You can seal things up with plastic like glass, but it’s not as heavy and doesn’t break as easy. If you created something that could truly fill the same niche as plastic, it would be just as terrible.

And the niche plastic fills in our economy and culture boils down fundamentally to convenience. Plastic lets you seal food and other perishable products up, ship them across the globe, and let them sit on a shelf for weeks, months, even a year, until the exact moment the person that wants to consume it wants it. Plastic means you can decide “man I’m really craving Cool Ranch Doritos right now” and walk or drive five minutes to the nearest convenience store and just get some right there and then.

Now, a shift away from that would also help emissions, but the fact is that being anti-convenience (anti-consumerism is I believe the existing term) would be fundamentally antithetical to modern capitalism. It’s like the Satanism of the modern capitalist church. Not only would policies supporting it be difficult to enact, but the corporations don’t even need to worry about that because they’ve got everybody hooked on instant access to everything. Good luck convincing people they should consume less when encouraging excess consumption is literally the sole unified goal of modern advertising, AND the sole goal of the modern pressure on minimum and other low-wage employees.

The average consumer with their average ability to interact philosophically has no way at all to even recognize this problem, let alone combat it. Then there’s people like me who do recognize the problem, but are too wildly depressed to continue existing in a world where they can’t order fried chicken to their door to prop up their serotonin and dopamine enough to not kill themselves for one more day.

I know I shouldn’t do any of that. But a world in which I do not require instant fried chicken to survive is also a world where they actually pay for enough work hours to properly support the mentally ill people that I do. A world in which I don’t need random and immediate serotonin and dopamine shots is a world where I only have to have manic as hell motherfuckers yell at me for 6 hours a day twice a week instead of 12h straight AND 3 in a row.

Society could be paying for me to give my genuine time and love to support the mentally ill. But they don’t want to. Because their paradigm fundamentally rests on asking me to sacrifice my mental integrity for other mentally ill people. They are relying on me participating in their fucked up system because I know that when I fall 100 other people fall with me. So I’ll buy into their system. Because I hate every part of it but I hate the idea of those 100 other people crashing and burning worse.

TL;DR: to truly reduce or eliminate plastic usage, we would have to give up on the idea of convenience and just eat, drink, and use things we already have and that are already nearby a lot more than we do right now. And there are so many ways that they keep every level of us from seeking that.