It’s sad how the costs of dealing with used plastics - whether recycling, landfill, or something else - are usually presented as a problem. Like, “look, it’s getting too expensive to have country X take it” or “it’s not economically feasible to recycle”. I wish the costs of dealing with plastic trash went up 10 times and there was absolutely no way for anyone to avoid them. That’s the only meaningful way to get people’s attention and stop consuming 400 million tons of plastic per year.

The amount of plastic bags is ridiculous. The packaging for many products is ridiculous. I feel good about being able to put groceries into my backpack rather than plastic bags. Unfortunately I don’t have an option to take other products of their crazy layered plastic packages and put those into my backpack as well, all that packaging going straight to garbage as soon as I get home. This makes me sad.