Recycling plastic more than once is basically impossible. It's also not a free process, as grinding up plastic creates micro particles that pollute our air and rivers.
The question is whether there's any material that's cheap, malleable and mass produced enough to replace plastic.
I throw mine away now because that's the only way I can make sure it doesn't get shipped to Asia and dumped into the ocean.
I'm not saying it's that easy, but sigh: it's a start.
Plastic per se isn't the problem, lack of reuse is, and that's a problem of not having to account for externalities.
If it weren't for marketing then we could refill simple reusable packets.
Plastic beer bottles it seems are not as popular as glass and the world drinks a lot of beer. Are there advantages to glass for beer?
This matters less for water or sugar water, but even Pepsi cares about the thickness of plastic used for something it knows will be drunk within a few months of production.
That reduces much of the emissions and congestion of shipping as well.
Local means you grow food in places not really suitable for it, so you need extra energy to make that happen. Would like you like to grow tomatoes in a heated greenhouse, or out in the open?
Local is also smaller quantity, so instead of huge efficiencies you need small individual shipments. This increases congestion.
Local has some advantages in terms of community, but environmentally speaking? It's 100% bad.
On a global scale, the huge (emissions) efficiency of loading a single enormous shipment of produce is only true on the receiving end, a number of farms far away all ran their own small deliveries to a depot for shipping at the start of the chain. There is no magic turbo-carrot-farm that harvests the world’s supply in one go.