> The alternative to this system would incur mass death for most of the population on the planet

Maybe we could produce less plastic waste, like action figures and other toy junk?

Children need/benefit from having toys, sure, but do we need mountains of options, many of which are destined for the landfill without ever leaving their packaging?

There's a lot of areas we could cut back on excess without necessarily giving up the life saving medications, air conditioning and high standard of living. Maybe just maybe?

We don’t need any of those things, but they’re in no way the source of our problems anyway, and eliminating them will do nothing of significance to solve the problems. So it’s pointless to discuss.

We have so many plastic toys because plastic is cheap. Plastic is cheap because the feedstocks fall out, practically for free, from the refining of fuel that we absolutely need for society to function at the scale that provides us a healthy and comfortable standard of living.

So the main problem we need to solve is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The rest will follow. When the economies of scale for oil and gas extraction go away, the balance will massively tip in the favour of renewable solutions.

We will still make lots of useless plastic toys though. But perhaps it’ll be bio plastics and perhaps the scale will diminish a bit as the price increases.

And I think they’ll end up in trash burning facilities with district heating rather than landfills. That’s already the trend in Northern Europe, and they’ve started importing trash to burn. Yeah, recycle first. But eventually everything degrades and should be burned.