I loathe the trend to blame the end consumer for their waste and eliminate very publicly visible things like straws when the vast majority is caused by industry every step of the way. The amount of plastic I see in retail garbage bins is sickening, and the average customer has no clue because it's all long before anything ends up on the shelf.

Then people stop using plastic cutlery and think they're helping the planet meanwhile it's just a facade to keep the real wasters off their radar.

I've seen the same or even worse. Pallets of stuff would be received, all wrapped up tight in an ungodly amount of plastic. The pallet would be unwrapped, plastic discarded and the contents scanned to confirm the correct items and number of items were present on the pallet. After each item was scanned and it's serial number recorded, someone would go to validate the items. When validated and found to be correct, the items were again stacked on a pallet and wrapped by another ungodly amount of plastic. The terrible thing was, as I was outside of the distribution chain, I had a view on the bigger picture. Items would often go through several of these places, each doing the exact same. The amounts of plastic each item consumed in the process was huge. But it was necessary, errors were found often, so the steps needed to be done. And the pallets could often get wet, nobody would accept soggy cardboard, so it needed to be wrapped.

The issue is plastic is basically free and extremely good at what it does. A more permanent solution like encasing the goods in some other material, like wood or metal would be more expensive and do a worse job. It's similar to asbestos, where the solution is so good, nothing else can compete. It took a mighty effort and strict laws to mostly abandon asbestos. I fear humanity has lost its will to live and won't have it in us to ban single-use plastic.

Some places did use metal trollies instead of pallets, but the pallets were never really a problem. They were almost always made from sustainable woods, be re-used often, till they just about fell apart. After which they were sent out for recycling, either back into a refurbished pallet, or a stamped recycled wood pallet or other recycled wood product.

It'd be great if more and more companies packaged their foods through EcoEnclose or similar.

It'd be even better if this was made default by legislation that eliminates the need for good will.

Health of humans is always excluded from plastic reduction laws and for good reason.

Tbf, I remember the times we reused everything, even tubes.

And it was a mess and there is so much evidence that the whole process of reusing is even worse for the environment.

Plastic recycling in the home is basically a scam, but at the scale of a hospital where you're generating large amounts of the same (known) plastic that's going in its own bin, it's much easier to recycle. I just bought a bunch of recycled PET that mostly came from medical waste.

And we don't throw pipette tips in the ocean, we throw them in the biohazard box. While not better for the environment, at least we don't choke baby turtles.

No they wouldn't. Banning straws is politically expedient, not effective policy. Straws are a tiny drop in the bucket of plastic waste. But they're visible, largely optional, and have alternatives. It's easy to make them look bad so a politician can look big by banning them. Your average person can feel like they're making a difference by buying a reusable straw. The industrial scale plastic waste that happens out of sight is allowed to continue because nobody cares about actually doing anything. Everyone wants to feel like they're doing something.

All you need to do is walk on the side of a busy road and look in the ditch to see what people just throw away.

It's not a lot of shampoo bottles, but tons of plastic cups and accompanied straws.

How much shampoo are you going through???

Ah, but you must see that recycling costs money! It’s cheaper to pretend you’re recycling and just throw it in the oceans and rivers and landscapes!

I hate it here. We even throw out online returns nearly 100% of the time for all it’s worth, it’s fucking crazy.

Good luck choking sea turtles by throwing straws in the river. The only turtles you'll choke that way are the river turtles

My headcanon says that this used to have a plastic window instead, until someone pointed out that having a plastic window in packaging of paper straws is ridiculous, so they decided to remove it. A package redesign without a window was also proposed, but was rejected for budgetary reasons.