> Going from plastic soda bottles back to glass ones, for example, would probably be an environmental disaster.
This is only true if said glass bottles were not reusable (and their reuse wasn't compelled in some fashion).
This is only true if said glass bottles were not reusable (and their reuse wasn't compelled in some fashion).
A simple ban on plastic bottles would address none of this. You'd have to look at the big picture to be sure you can achieve good results.
I'd wager that we'd get much better results by instead introducing a tax on, say, every beverage container that enters the waste stream. Or, maybe easier to enforce, that cannot be proven not to have entered the waste stream. That would be a single legislative string to pull that would give the industry a strong economic incentive to address all (or at least most) of the real causes of the problem.