All food containers must be recyclable or compostable. This should be a rule across the globe.
We should also ban single-use plastic. If costs need to go up, then let them go up. Consumers need to understand the costs of their consumption and we can’t destroy our planet so that corporations can be more profitable.
If only we had responsible, effective government with the balls to do what has to be done to protect the future. This business of short term thinking and to hell with the future is not only ruining things it is very literally current generations stealing from future generations.
I think we should make a law to compensate for that. Those social security obligations where the current working generations pay for past generations retirement? Let's reduce that considerably. Let's also raise estate taxes. It's fair, they created and benefited from this mess and then left it to us to bear.
Does if you want it done by elected politicians in a properly functioning democracy.
But even then democratic governments do things that are unpopular all the time. I don't think it's untenable. But even if it cost politicians their re-election, it's still the right thing to do.
From barely visible offshore wind turbine complaints in Martha's Vineyard, to reluctance of former coal miners to retrain to less lucrative industries to the original luddites solving problems can piss /a lot/ of people off.
It doesn't make them non-viable but it isn't as easy as you would think from superficial popularity.
One silver lining they get is R&D of others can help them skip the step some steps compared to the past west's development paths. Cell phones connected the third world in absense of wires and individual autorouting compared to party lines and operator based dispatches. Something similar is happening to a degree with renewables.
Renewables are a nice fit to them in several ways, the storage and grid free unreliability is unfortunately nothing new to them. It is a bit of a situational dubious blessing like "We don't need to worry about chemo being carcogenic - you already have stage 3 cancer". Not ideal but few things are for the third world even if they are improving.
The hitch is affordability for people with lower incomes. While it is easy to be critical about single serving beverages and over packages potato chips, the vast majority of goods found in most grocery stores are packaged.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that we need to do away with packaged foods entirely. the fundamental relationship between surface area and volume means we can improve things substantially just by using bigger containers. a plastic quart-sized container of apple sauce still uses a lot less plastic than two four packs of single-serving cups. once you're buying and selling food in larger containers, the material cost of the container contributes less to the total cost of the product, leaving some headroom to use more expensive materials.
Getting ride of single serving packaging cannot really be done through the initiative of individual businesses. Consumers will simply switch to products providing single serving packages if that is what they desire. What has to be changed is the desire. You also have to consider that there are cases when small package sizes are legitimate, such as when someone uses very little of a product.
Regulation may not solve the problem either. Some people simply prefer single use packaging over cleaning and reusing smaller containers. Consider something like school lunches. When schools ask families to pack lunches using reusable containers, there is often a backlash and a few who simply don't understand the concept of reusable packaging. Quite often, things get sent in baggies or plastic wrap or inexpensive containers that are only used a handful of times before being tossed. This is ignoring the world of adult lunches, where adults often do the same or worse (e.g. ordering food in disposable packaging).
As simple as the solutions may sound, getting people to go along with it is a difficult problem.
https://interestingengineering.com/drug-store-in-czechia-bri...
This is why finding sustainable solutions that lower costs, not raise them is the dream solution.
Economic stability is what permits people to have the free time to care about abstract things like "the environment". Raise the cost of food, raise the cost of fuel, "internalize the externalities" or whatever the doublespeak of the day is, and you're gonna have a hell of a lot more people living on the edge and those people are gonna care a hell of a lot more about their immediate needs than about the environment (and they'll vote accordingly). These changes might look small at a micro level but at a macro level anything that decreases standard of living makes people prioritize their short term needs over the long term.
Market driven economies that do not take into account environmental destruction and which cannot come to terms with wealth inequalities will be a huge danger to the future plight of humanity. Waiting for the market to "naturally" react by raising prices due to resource scarcity and destruction of supply chains due to environmental hazards will be too slow, and too little too late.
You don't have to wait for the market, you just need to make sure that proposed policies aren't massively affecting the lower classes. Food insecurity isn't a good foundation for a stable and peaceful society. When you're artificially generating it, you might want to take care of the poverty first, not the other way around.
I dunno, there's a whole site devoted to renting and buying islands around the world
https://www.privateislandsonline.com/
Some of the prices aren't too over the top.