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Glass bottles used to be much more common but they're more expensive, very easy to break, and heavier, which also increases cost of transportation. Paper containers for things can't be allowed to get wet which often makes them impractical. Metals are expensive, potentially reactive, heavy, and inflexible.
Yes plastics are very environmentally problematic, but they do solve a lot of problems that aren't really solved by any other kind of material.
The choice was a purely pseudo-economic one.
a) Alternatives needed less than 12 months longer R&D.
b) Alternatives were less than 5% more expensive.
c) Alternatives were reusable/repairable and would not have been single-use, which would have reduced production mid- and long-term.
d) Alternatives would have sparked more industries and would have created more jobs, more captains and more (metaphorical) ships, especially in engineering and crafts.
e) Alternatives would have meant better production methods and waste that would be easier and more constructive to handle, which would have meant better health and a more thriving environment and natural produce, which would have meant less opportunity to study negative impacts on humans as well as flora and fauna and less opportunity to make all kinds of swarms dependent on corporate "solutions".
Again, alternatives would have sparked more industries and would have boosted our civilization's/colony's R&D by 50 or more years. And the resulting cumulative competition would have boosted R&D even further. More money overall, less of gap between the wealthiest and the rest.
Pretending that the growing populations required unhealthy factory jobs is thus irrational. People were keen to learn and work and thrive and even dimwits like me had enough brains to catch up within a few months or years.
The conventional argument "do we create jobs now or later" is nonsense, as more emerging industries would have meant at least just as many jobs.
I could probably use an LLM and some books to craft a much better and technical answer but I probably won't use any for at least some longer while.
Life is better without plastic straws and plastic plates and plastic knifes and so on ... and people who don't care usually care but the brain structure to admit that is premature.
99% of these things are entirely cultural and habitual.
Straws are just another utensil, I agree with OP that we could largely make do with alternate materials for them.
Glass and steel straws sound nice on paper, but using them is a whole different ball game.
Nobody will really miss single apples wrapped in plastic in the store.
In 60 years I don't recall ever seeing a single apple wrapped in plastic in a store.
I have seen a plastic bag of apples pre selected weighed and ready to be grabbed .. but most apples are loose and you bag them yourself picking as many of the ones you want individually.
"how many apples are thrown away" is not just a question of personal responsibility and brains but how the public was "raised" over generations of mass production and cheap methods.
"even" in Germany ( I don't know why I keep saying this ), and in upper class super markets, fresh produce rots much quicker than anything we produce in our gardens. mid-priced frozen stuff triggers unhealthy/gassy reactions in stomach and guts that are not triggered by higher-priced frozen stuff but again, the crowd doesn't care because it was raised that way or does not know.
cheap liquor produce triggers worse reactions in body and brain, short-, mid- and long-term because the production methods are not as clean because producers are OK with the negative outcomes because they were raised to believe that their customers are "fucking stupid".
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/you-asked/why-do-they-spra...
The irony of making phones out of glass is they are terribly fragile and often become e-waste after so much as being knocked off a table.
20th century plastic telephones were so rugged they often doubled as weapons in films.
Glass is heavier and more breakable than plastic. I'm not sure I want to give my baby glass cups. He tends to drop and throw things.
Although, if the goal is to switch entirely off of plastic, I don't think modern glass baby bottles will do that, because the ones I've seen still use plastic caps.
BTW, we just bought some glass bottles (with plastic caps) today. We'll see how they go.
BTW, we just bought some glass bottles (with plastic caps) today. We'll see how they go.
But there are many areas where plastics are quite literally life savers and it will be hard to replace them. For example, look at a modern ER and imagine it without plastics. Won't happen.
Glass is much more energy-intensive to create and process than plastic, and its strength-to-weight ratio means that you'll be spending more energy (carbon emissions, whatever) on transportation too. It's also not flexible nor resistant to impact.
One problem is, the economic externalities are not priced into plastic.
So is it much better than plastic?
Plenty of people have been buying glass over plastic exactly when possible for this reason. Those people show that it's a concious decision and are not to be waved away.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy...
And glass in landfills isn’t doing much harm.
My town doesn’t recycle glass.