Or perhaps everyone is actually better of if negative externalities are taxed.

The fraction of the world's population regularly consuming manufactured and packaged goods is also increasing. That increases discarded plastics and other materials.

About a decade ago I tracked down the somewhat provocative claim that contemporary New Yorkers (city, not state) produced less refuse, by mass, than those of the 1930s. My first thoughts were that total packaging weight and waste food might account for this, older packaging materials being more ecologically-friendly, but generally more massive: wood, glass, metal, etc., and refrigeration and food preservation less developed.

Good guesses, but wrong as it happens.

The culprit was coal ash, on the order of 40% of all rubbish by weight. It had been > 80% in 1900.

Building heat was supplied by boilers running on coal. That left a large quantity of fly ash as residue. As heating switched to natural gas and cogeneration steam from the 1950s through the 1960s, coal use was largely eliminated.

Former generations of New Yorkers would often refer to receptacles as ash cans, and they were traditionally made of galvanized steel, both useful when contents might contain glowing coals. As trash evolved to colder refuse, plastic bins or bags could be substituted. "[T]he New York City Sanitation Department began encouraging the use of plastic garbage bags in 1969." (<https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/...>)

Net non-coal refuse has increased, but the total, at least as of a decade ago, was still below the early-20th-century high point. Much of the current total however is plastics, and in particular disposable diapers.

I'd had additional sources on this at one point though I can't locate them presently.

This paper discusses composition and confirms the 40% & 80% figures above:

"How New York City Residents Diminished Trash", Paul E Waggoner and Jesse H. Ausubel, The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, New Haven andRockefeller University, New York. October 2003.

<https://phe.rockefeller.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/NYTra...>

The NYT article above also confirms "ash cans".

Except it isn't a "bogus number". Fossil fuel subsidies are real.

>"It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income."

https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/sen-wh...

I say give the subsidies to environmentally friendly producers instead, that don't use fossil fuels as the base material for producing packaging products. $1 trillion in one year is just an unfathomable amount of money to give away to corporations that are already making record profits far above the $1 trillion they already get.

PFAS aren't plastics.

And removing them clearly didn't increase the price of sticks of butter by $5.

Do you know that it’s waxed paper, and not plasticized paper? Genuine question, since I imagine “wax” paper is either plasticized or using petroleum-based waxes.

I’ve had the same steel water bottle for over 10 years. Just because you don’t reuse things well doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I mean, of course it's not perfect. But isn't 2 water bottles in a land fill orders of magnitude better than 300? Isn't the reduction of bulk trash the point? Why would the fact that a glass container can break make it not still a better alternative to 50 plastic ones?

Plus all of the food hygiene and logistical implications of handling products in bulk, multiplied by the 30,000 different products in a typical supermarket.

I don't know about the US, but in my country butter is packaged in waxed paper, which is fully biodegradable.

My local supermarket chains already do that. It's called the Deli Counter. The cost is not a big deal.