[JohnWhigham]

Shouldn't we tax the externalities of plastic and let the market decide whether it's worth it?

If that were enacted tomorrow, every business would just eat the cost and raise prices.

but what about the costs of glass? eg. increased weight or energy/water needed to clean them.

That's what federal subsidies are for. Make it worth it to use glass, or some other material other than plastic. Subsidies are how we got cheap dairy and meat, why can't it be used for other things?

how is driving a truck door to door delivering exclusively milk more efficient than picking it up on your way to the grocery store?

I was just spitballing, more rhetorical than anything. Milkmen used to be everywhere delivering milk in glass bottles before the plastics lobby and dairy subsidies drove them to extinction.

[gruez]

I think you're missing the point. You want us to switch on the assumption that plastic is intrinsically bad and glass is intrinsically good, without going through the analysis to confirm whether it's actually the case. Sure, glass has benefits compared to plastic, but it also has costs. Should we switch to glass even if it's 2x more expensive (in dollar terms) than plastic? What about 3x? 5x? What about in terms of environmental terms (eg. energy use/water use)? If using glass produces 2x the greenhouse gasses overall, should we still use it? What about 3x? 5x?

A good point of comparison would be plastic bags vs paper bags vs cotton bags. I think most people "feel" that plastic bags are bad and should be replaced with the alternatives, but paper bags are equal to plastic bags when you only look at climate impact, but is 43x worse than LDPE bags when factoring in "all indicators". Should we still switch to paper bags in this case?

https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...