I wonder if this focus on plastic waste was created by oil companies to distract people from climate change. Solving climate change depends on solving pollution of greenhouse gases mainly from burning fossil fuels. People seem to conflate any pollution with climate change.

It is important to keep plastic waste out of the oceans and other places. But I'm not sure if that can't be solved by making sure they get thrown away. There is plenty of space for landfills. Plastic in landfill is carbon neutral. There is energy in making plastic, but there is energy in making the alternatives and from the price, plastic likely uses less.

The other thing is that for climate change, plastic is a pretty small part of the problem, 2% of global emissions. Like it is more important how the restaurant is heated and cooled and how all the customers got there, than what the utensils are made of.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument when it's something like plastic bottles or whatever, because goods have to be packaged in something, and environmentalists who want alternatives are forced to use plastic because it's simply not profitable for companies to offer alternatives. However, in this case that logic doesn't apply. Your decision on whether to get cutlery or not directly impacts whether the amount of plastic being generated, at least in theory.

And is happily endorsed by almost every single company so they can continue to harm the environment and us without any restrictions.