Glass is inconvenient, and only becomes better once a sufficient proportion of your energy comes from clean sources.
It's a discussion worth having again as renewables rates increases, but it's not a straightforward tradeoff.
Glass is inconvenient, and only becomes better once a sufficient proportion of your energy comes from clean sources.
It's a discussion worth having again as renewables rates increases, but it's not a straightforward tradeoff.
Banning avoidable plastic would drastically reduce demand for oil, accelerating move to renewables.
Reducing demand for oil would reduce it's price, which might well slow the move to renewables. It's rarely so simple.
If you are making and selling something that is falling in demand, you are forced to sell it cheaper, which eats at your margins. As the price falls, eventually you sell at a loss, but you are motivated to wrap that business up and start making something else long before.
The gap down to where most oil fields are no longer profitable is huge, so while that would eventually happen, reduced plastic use is not likely to bring us there.
The amount of plastic used for packaging that can be replaced with something else is also huge. Case in point: this article. Also, it is probably not an exaggeration that every item in every supermarket that I personally lay my eyes on uses plastic, a lot of it avoidable.
As oil becomes less in demand as fuel, we should be aware that manufacturers would do their best effort to promote any other uses of it they can find, including plastic packaging, vinyl records, etc. To not do that would be stupid on their part.