Beth's most recent Fake Plastic Fish post, "Plastic: What is it good for?"  has really gotten me thinking.  My main issue with plastic is its ubiquity in the consumer market. 

Food packaging is the worst offender, if you ask me, since the packaging has such a short designed lifespan.  It's meant to be thrown away as soon as you open the package and eat the food.  And unlike, say, a new computer, you are presumably buying and eating a lot of food on a weekly or monthly basis.

Go into a grocery store and come out with a week's worth of groceries that includes NO PLASTIC, I dare you.  It's really hard!  Boxed foods like crackers and cereal have a plastic bag inside.  Canned foods are out, since modern cans are all lined with a thin plastic coating (which contains BPE, today's plastic bugaboo chemical).  I'm unable to find coffee at the grocery store that doesn''t come in some kind of plastic packaging (even if you use the bulk dispensing units, those bags have plastic liners).  Many condiments come in glass jars - but the jars were "protected" with a plastic safety seal. 

Sure, my computer is made largely of plastic.  The monitor, keyboard, mouse, cables - these are all made of plastic.  But I don't feel bad or guilty about that, because these items are designed to last for years.  Don't get me wrong, the issue of "e-Waste" disposal is a serious one.  But I go through maybe two computers in a decade.  Even considering the end of lifespan disposal, I still don't feel that this can come close to touching the problem of what I bring home from the grocery store every week.

No one would argue that the medical field should be forced to seek alternatives to plastic.  Even though this is the straw man most often held up by the other side.  "Sure, get rid of plastic!  Then we'll all die without plastic IV lines!"  A lot of medical plastic is designed to be single use and disposable, but I'm okay with that. 

My hope for the future is that declining petroleum reserves will cause the cost of plastic to skyrocket.  I think basic economic theory is likely to change the landscape of the grocery store more than any grass roots protest, as negative as that sounds.  The reason plastic has become so ubiquitous in our lives is that it is very cheap.  It's cheap to produce, and its low weight (relative to glass or metal) makes it cheap to ship. 

Unfortunately, the true cost of plastic piles up at the far end of its lifespan, as it leaches toxic chemicals from garbage dumps into our ground water, or drifts into the Pacific Garbage Patch.  That's another way we could spin the fix -forcing manufacturers to take back or pay for the recycling of their products would raise the price, and encourage manufacturers to seek other (non-plastic) solutions.  Many copy toner manufacturers will take back and re-use their ink cartridges, and I'd like to see other industries use this solution.  But the most likely way that's going to happen is if it saves the company money.