The Cure for Disposable Plastic Crap Is Here—and It’s Loony | WIRED

A plastic bag might be the most overengineered object in history. Some years back, I stopped by a French deli to buy some big chunks of cheese and carried them home in a plastic bag. The cheese was so heavy that the bag stretched and bulged, and the handle dug painfully into my hands. But the bag didn’t break. That’s because of the magical chemistry of plastic—essentially, oil turned solid, with carbon and hydrogen atoms that line up in repeating units to form long, noodle-like molecules.

These molecules are pliable and strong, which is what makes plastic so widely useful. And so durable: I unpacked the hunks of Camembert and Havarti and shoved the bag into the back of a kitchen drawer. When I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago, it was still pristine. Of course it was. Plastic bags can last, intact and usable, for decades.

Which is … nuts, right? We create a bag rugged enough to span decades and then use it for minutes before shoving it in a drawer or, more likely, sending it off to a landfill, where it might break into fragments that stick around for hundreds of years. Like I said: the most overengineered object in history.

The environmental problem of “single-use plastics” haunts the public imagination like a spectral wolf. And no wonder—the sheer welter of everyday objects we make from plastic is astonishing. There’s plastic in grocery bags, obviously, but also in yoga pants and car tires and building materials and toys and medical products. The transition came on quickly: Plastic use was comparatively small until the 1970s, when it exploded, tripling by the 1990s. Then it went into overdrive, and in the next 20 years we used as much plastic as we had in the previous 40. We now crank out more than 500 million tons of plastic waste a year. Globally, only 9 percent of plastics are recycled. The rest go into landfills or get incinerated, pumping toxic fumes into the air, usually in poor neighborhoods. A significant chunk also ends up in the ocean, which has already amassed as much as 219 million tons of the stuff—wrappers washing up on shorelines, chunks eaten by fish, islands of plastic forming in watery gyres at sea.

It’s a lot. Too much, many of us agree. And if we want to begin unwinding the plastic revolution? One good place to start is all those single-use products—because, according to the UN Environment Programme, they make up fully 36 percent of the plastics we use every year.

They’re not easy to walk away from, in part because we use so many types in so many places. We’ve got “thin films” like bags, thicker plastics in take-out bowls, multi-layered plastic containers for grocery store meat, and see-through polyethylene terephthalate bottles for soda and water. Each has its own chemical properties, molecular makeup, and performance specs. A single replacement for all that packaging? It doesn’t exist.

What does exist, though, is a set of promising developments in the management, as it were, of single-use stuff.

It’s a war on three fronts: Replace some of our single-use plastics with truly compostable materials. Replace another chunk with reusable containers, like metal or glass. And, finally, tweak the economic incentives so plastic recycling actually works. This isn’t my battle plan; it’s a theme I heard over and over as I spent the past year talking to scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, and policy folk.

None of these ploys is a slam dunk. They’ll need not only innovation but also binders full of smart government incentives and regulation—all of which, of course, will be resisted by petroleum firms. But if you add up all these unplastic developments, you’ll find grounds for cautious optimism: We’ve got a path to a world less littered with deathless plastic waste.

Standing in her sun-drenched lab in San Leandro, California, Julia Marsh grabbed a small see-through bag and handed it to me. It was shiny like cellophane, the sort of thing a company might use to package a set of earrings or some candies. Bags like this? “They’re absolutely ubiquitous,” Marsh said.

As I opened the pouch and turned it over in my hands, I realized it was a little stiffer than I expected. That’s because it was made of seaweed and composed of the plant’s poly-saccharides, long chains of carbohydrate molecules.

So, not quite the same performance as a plastic bag, but with a better trade-off: You can throw it on a regular home composting heap, Marsh said, and in a few weeks you’ll find only scraps of it. In six months, it’ll be an organic part of the soil.

“Bioplastics” aren’t new; over the past few decades, engineers have made plastic alternatives from sugarcane, corn, and more. The hardest part has been making sure they actually return to nature. Most bioplastics need to be shipped to an industrial composting facility (designed to break down organic materials faster), and few American towns possess one. Some bioplastics contain additives that don’t break down at all.

Marsh wants to fix that. A 30-year-old with a surfer-like vibe, she grew up playing in the water along the central California shores. She marveled at the coast’s riot of natural beauty and sea life—and became increasingly horrified by the deluge of plastic ocean pollution and the dead whales found with bellies full of the stuff. Marsh moved to New York to pursue a career in design—branding, packaging, that sort of thing. But after seeing up close how wasteful companies could be in wrapping and delivery, she balked. She didn’t want a career where she’d be cranking out so much trash.

Marsh decided instead to tackle the plastics packaging problem. The fashion industry uses billions of thin plastic “polybags” every year to ship its articles. What if she could make them out of something that could actually be composted?

She didn’t want to work with a feedstock like corn, though. To make tons of bioplastics out of those materials, you’d need to grow so much of them that you’d wreck the soil and emit lots of CO2. Marsh’s partner, Matt Mayes, was doing a master’s degree in sustainable development, which brought him to Indonesia. She joined him for a visit and toured some of the country’s seaweed farms. That got her thinking: Maybe seaweed was a better building block for a bioplastic. It’s got nice gelling properties that are suited to making films. Indeed, seaweed is often used to give toothpastes and cosmetics their gluey texture. Better yet, seaweed “regenerates really quickly,” she noted, so you’d get crops fast while using less space than corn. She ticked off the other benefits: “Requires virtually zero inputs to grow. Really low carbon usage, really low energy. No fertilizer, no arable land—no fresh water! And seaweed farms serve as water filtration systems. They provide habitat for biodiversity.” And seaweed was becoming kind of hot. A few startups in Europe were already using it to make everything from the lining for take-out containers to little water-filled gel balls that athletes could use to rehydrate.

Back in New York, she set about doing some experiments in her kitchen. After poking around on YouTube, she learned she could order powdered seaweed polysaccharides online, then mix them with hot water to make a gooey gel that cools into a plasticky material. Pulling out her phone, she showed me pictures of her results: lumpy, malformed green dishes and a bowl.

“Really horrible, ugly, disturbing-looking prototypes,” she said. But she learned that bioplastics were “not necessarily about super complicated science” but rather the patience for years of tinkering. Hire some serious materials engineers, she figured, and they could make real progress on the polybag problem.

Not every plastic bag should be perfectly stretchy, strong, and durable for the ages. Those specs were bonkers to begin with.

She and Mayes founded Sway in the early months of Covid; their first hire was Matt Catarino, a materials engineer who’d worked for six years in Big Plastic (as he calls it) and engineered everything from medical waste bags to protective film for cars. But he’d had enough. Over the next few months, Catarino produced a crude thin-film prototype that got the startup $2.5 million in investment. Sway poured the money into more hiring and renting a lab in San Leandro.

When I visited last year, Marsh shooed me over to a rack with four thick rolls of their “flagship” plastic. She unspooled a bit; it was clear and thicker than Saran Wrap. One version was a pretty light green mottled with darker green dots—bits of “less refined kelp” for aesthetic effect, Marsh said. I held it up to the light like stained glass. “The jewelry folks really like that one,” she said.

Behind her was another shelf with dozens of cups filled with dirt. Amanda Guan, a materials engineer, had buried in each cup a piece of bioplastic 2 centimeters square, to test how the material decomposes. She pulled a cup out and dug into the dirt. When she finally located a fragment of plastic, it measured 1 centimeter on each side. “This has only been in there for two weeks,” she noted, seeming pleased.

The members of Marsh’s lab group were like a team from the Marvel Universe: There was Guan, who’d recently gotten her master’s degree, in a white lab coat, gray turtleneck, and plastic safety goggles that somehow managed to look hip; Joakim Engström, a boisterous Swedish polymer scientist with a bushy mustache and a wool hat; and Catarino, the Big Plastics escapee, reserved beneath his baseball cap.

One of the lab’s biggest challenges was that their bioplastic was hard to melt. That’s a big deal when you’re manufacturing plastic bags at scale. To make plastic sheets, manufacturers typically melt down plastic pellets, known as nurdles, and blow the resulting goop into a huge bag “like two stories tall,” as Catarino told me. Oil-based plastics melt readily; seaweed, in contrast, hates the heat. “It just kind of burns,” he added. So they tried adding other organic compounds to make the polysaccharide chains meltier. Near one wall of the Sway lab, bright metal racks held rows of numbered containers and dishes filled with nurdles, the results of their experiments. When I visited they were up to 144 and were finally getting it to melt pretty well. I’d love to tell you how the Sway team is cracking this puzzle, but they wouldn’t fully explain their chemistry—state secrets.

If Sway’s bioplastic is going to replace polybags, it also has to be stretchy—and here the team was still struggling. Guan led me over to a corner of the lab, where she clipped a Band-Aid-sized piece of their film between two robotic pinchers. The arms pulled from both ends and measured how many newtons of force could be applied before the material broke. The pieces snapped after only a few seconds.

“That was pretty bad,” Guan said sheepishly.

“Test a good one, Amanda,” Marsh said, with a laugh.

Still, the team isn’t too bothered. As Marsh said, for the unplastic revolution to take off, people’s expectations for how plastic behaves will have to change. Not every plastic bag should be perfectly stretchy, strong, and durable for the ages. Those specs were bonkers to begin with.

I kept in touch with Marsh over the following months, and last fall she showed me a video of Sway’s bioplastic in production at a manufacturing plant. The first batches scorched, producing a sort of “black goo,” Marsh told me, until they dialed in the processing conditions. Their films were becoming softer too. When Marsh shipped me some samples in April 2024, they were silky to the touch, and I could stretch them a bit. (My teenage son was impressed; he also, before I could say I don’t think you’re supposed to do that, ripped off a small chunk and chewed on it. “It tastes like seaweed,” he said.)

Critics of bioplastics abound. Many doubt that they can ever be reliably composted. Historically those people have been right, of course—and Sway and other companies like it have yet to prove them wrong. Marsh told me the startup had submitted its materials to TÜV, an Austrian firm that can certify whether they actually compost. Then there’s the question of whether highly scaled, mass seaweed farming would have unwanted side effects—which, fair enough. Marsh knows these critiques and shares many of them, particularly about whether bioplastics are genuinely compostable. The whole point of Sway, she says, is to make a product that addresses the concerns.

Her corporate clients, at least, are excited. One, Eco-Enclose—a firm that makes “sustainable packaging”—is using Sway’s thin films to make see-through windows on card-stock boxes for brands like Smartwool. Burton, the snowboarding company, wants to use Sway’s material to wrap products during shipping. And the J.Crew Group, which has made a pledge to stop using virgin plastic by 2025 and currently buys polybags made from recycled materials, intends to switch to Sway’s bioplastics. (I had expected that the corporate impetus to use less oil-based plastic came from conscientious customers, but the pressure is also from staff members. This makes a sort of psychological sense: A customer encounters only one bag at a time, but employees can be hip-deep in them.)

A true stress test of the new materials is coming up. In shipping, polybags get tossed around on conveyor belts and can rip. This year, Sway’s bioplastic bags will “go through our machinery in real time,” Doug Forster, chief sourcing officer for J.Crew Group, told me this spring.

As a science nerd, I dug the prospect of perfecting this new chemistry. But it was also clear that even if Marsh and her team were maximally successful, Sway’s materials would solve only some of our single-use problem. Stores would still be choked with other plastics, particularly for food products—zillions of bottles, sporks, take-out containers, peanut butter jars. Was there any way, right now, to unplasticize all that?

It’s not a good idea to talk about single-use plastics around Kjell Olav Maldum.

He gets deeply annoyed by the term—because as far as he’s concerned, not a single plastic molecule should ever be used just once. “It’s not single-use! Just collect and recycle it, and this will be useful plastic!” he said when we first spoke on Zoom. Indeed, he considers traditional, petroleum-based plastics a critical part of modernity. “Try to run a hospital without plastic. Try to run a society without plastic. It’s not possible!” He’d rather we all focus on making sure almost none winds up in the garbage, the ocean, or the soil.

Maldum is a strange blend of personalities—part bombastic prophet, part matter-of-fact bureaucrat. One might be tempted to dismiss his pro-plastic stance, except that he runs one of the most successful plastic-recycling operations on the planet. In Norway, his company Infinitum manages a system to collect and recycle bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, the sort that holds soda or water. PET is one of the easier plastics to recycle; it melts and reforms pretty readily. Even so, in the US, only a minority of PET bottles get recycled. The main PET industry association puts the recycling rate at 29 percent, while Greenpeace says it’s 20.9 percent. In Norway, though, Infinitum recycles nearly every damn bottle. How the heck did they achieve this?

With a combo of clever technology and deft public policy. As is often the case, the policy was the prime mover. Running a recycling program requires a lot of expensive labor and systems. You have to collect the plastic and separate it by type, which is expensive.

So in the late ’90s, Norway passed a law that forced somebody to pay for it—specifically, companies such as Coca-Cola that make plastic PET containers. Firms got hit with a new tax if they didn’t pay to collect and recycle used bottles. If the beverage companies can prove they’re recycling 95 percent as many bottles as they sell, they pay no tax. Otherwise, the less they recycle, the more they owe—until they’re paying “hundreds of millions of Norwegian kroner,” Maldum said (tens of millions of US dollars).

The bottle makers snapped to attention and began developing a system to get their used bottles back. In 1999, the companies founded Infinitum to manage collection. Maldum has been its CEO for the past 16 years. The company rolled out a wide network of “reverse” vending machines: Customers shove bottles in and earn a few coins back. Every bottle has a barcode specific to its maker. The machine scans the code and the shape of the bottle to track which company gets credit. (This labeling system is also why Norway has such reliable data on its recycling levels.) The bottles are squished and dropped into huge bags, and Infinitum hauls them to a sorting facility. The clear and colored bottles are sorted, crushed, and sold to a recycling firm, which processes the materials for other companies to then shape into new bottles.

Perfecting the system took years. Infinitum also demanded changes to bottle design that simplified recycling. A beverage company might, for example, attach its label with a stubborn glue that is hard to wash off. If Infinitum finds a bottle’s design is causing problems, it can deny the company credit in its system. To avoid getting hit with the tax, companies now run their bottle designs by Infinitum and fix any unrecyclable elements before they begin production. To recycle well, you need standardization. The tax gives Infinitum the power to enforce simplicity.

There’s a term of art for this whole system: reverse logistics. For the first 100 years of the plastics revolution, companies essentially sprayed products at customers—it was a one-way movement of atoms. Successful recycling requires doing this process in reverse, an entirely new set of skills. How do you get stuff back? What new economics, technologies, and policies do you need?

And what social engineering? Customers might decide, Eh, who cares about the 20 cents, and throw their bottles away. So Infinitum runs playfully encouraging ads. One shows a tennis player in a locker room hurling a bottle in the trash. A voiceover notes that making a new one takes as much energy as running a ball machine for an hour-plus. Suddenly he’s pelted with balls as he runs and ducks for cover.

Altogether, the strategy has worked. In Norway consumers are now so environmentally conscious that they’ve started actively choosing to buy beverages made from recycled bottles. Even though recycled PET costs anywhere from 1.5 to 1.75 times more expensive than virgin plastic, bottle makers buy it up and use it.

I wondered: Would it be possible to turn plastic bottles into a completely closed loop? Let’s imagine every country pulled a Norway—a politically hallucinogenic “if,” sure, but let’s go there. Could bottle makers keep on reusing those plastic molecules over and over, and never need virgin plastic?

Not entirely. When PET molecules are repeatedly recycled, they start “yellowing and darkening,” Michael Joyes, the sustainability director for Petainer, a European bottle maker, said. Eventually they turn black. You can lighten the stuff with “anti-yellow” chemicals or mix it with virgin materials. Or you can use these older plastics to bottle up drinks like Coke. “The inside’s dark too, so people don’t mind so much,” Joyes said.

Even so, repeatedly recycled PET becomes less useful over time. The polymer chains in the plastic get shorter. Clever chemistry hacks can lengthen them, and some recyclers predict recycled PET can be used up to eight times. EU legislation is mandating that by 2030, 30 percent of PET in bottles be recycled—and Joyes predicts that some countries and brands will push much higher, to 70 or even 100 percent recycled PET.

I was impressed by Infinitum’s success. But PET bottles are, chemically and structurally, the easiest plastic to recycle. They basically want to be reborn (until they don’t). Many other forms are more truculent. Consider food containers: They can consist of several plastics with different recycling processes. Pricey! Recyclers are experimenting with “chemical” recycling, where a bunch of different plastics are tossed into a vat and the various molecules separate out like the layers in a salad dressing. Thus far, though, chemical recycling is energy-intensive. Plastic would be recycled, sure, but it would cost a lot and emit mountains of CO2, trading one environmental problem for another.

“You go to these expos where it’s just, like, a showroom for garbage. ‘Let’s have an event where we show future garbage to people!’”

Maldum is more optimistic. He thinks Infinitum’s strategy for PET recycling could work for all plastics. The trick is to redesign the packaging so just about anything can be tossed into a reverse vending machine. “Why do you need to use a tray for meat? You can use a tube,” he said. It was an intriguing idea, but I couldn’t quite picture the wild welter of food wrappers all somehow reconfigured for a vending machine. Would people be as willing to carry empty tubes with raw-meat residue to the grocery store to shove in a machine?

What’s more, recycling of any sort has its own searing critics. Some American environmental groups regard plastic recycling as a naked form of greenwashing. They doubt recycling rates will ever escape the low digits in the US and outside Europe—because most politicians won’t enact serious penalties, and the quality of recycled plastics will be too low. And because plastic might be a big market for petroleum companies in the future, those corporations will likely fight hard to keep society hooked on it.

For straight-edge enviros, then, the only serious way to reduce single-use plastics is to just stop. Stop. Using. Them. Entirely.

I met Jason Hawkins at Field & Social, a lunch joint in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, known for its salad bowls. He picked the spiced Thai bowl; I chose the Thai peanut and chicken bowl. We ordered them to go.

Normally, of course, takeout is served in a plastic or paper container. Field & Social, though, uses a service offered by Hawkins’ “circular economy” startup, Reusables. Customers can ask to get their food in a stainless steel bowl or cup with a sleek silicone lid. When they’re done, they can drop it off—unwashed!—at any store that participates in Reusables’ network. (There are currently 75.) Each container has a QR code, so Reusables can track which customer has which container. If they don’t return it, they have to pay for it. Charges are up to $25 per unreturned container, though customers get refunded if they later bring it back. But in the 150,000 meals Reusables had served by the time Hawkins and I met, more than 98 percent of the containers ultimately came back.

The trick behind getting people to truly reuse things? Making it as easy as possible. “People have a lot of things going on in their life,” he told me as he tucked into his meal. “You’re hungry, you want a salad, you should just get a salad! It’s not up to people to be sustainable—it’s up to businesses and government to create the right infrastructure.”

Tall and angular, Hawkins has a jittery energy and a broad grin behind his scruffy blond beard. He got the idea for Reusables during the Covid pandemic, as everyone hunkered at home and the use of takeout exploded, producing a mountain of waste. Hawkins was working at an online organic-food grocery-delivery service called Spud and talked about the takeout boom with Anastasia Kiku, a college-student intern who’d immigrated from Russia. Both were repelled by how much plastic takeout was generating. It made them think: Maybe the best way to cut back on single-use garbage is just to rewind. Before plastic came along, our forebears used sturdy bowls and plates and washed and reused them. They “wasted nothing,” as Hawkins said. Maybe our grandparents had it right.

The duo concocted the idea of Reusables, and in late 2021 quickly built a prototype system. Customers would pay $5 a month to use as many containers as they wanted, and restaurants would pay a fee too. Hawkins and Kiku hired a company to pick up the dirty dishes from restaurants and clean them. By early 2023, they’d signed up more than 100 restaurants and food stores in Vancouver and Seattle.

Early users loved it. Many restaurant owners, it seems, truly loathe single-use take-out containers. Often it’s because, like those store employees at J.Crew, they hate being neck-deep in waste. When I spoke to Stewart Boyles, Field & Social’s director of operations and regional chef, he described attending conventions to scout new take-out containers. “You go to these expos where it’s just, like, a showroom for garbage. ‘Let’s have an event where we show future garbage to people!’”

Nonetheless, by last fall, Hawkins and Kiku were finding it harder to get new customers. Sure, die-hard environmentalist diners loved Reusables and were happy to pay for the service. But they were only a tiny minority of the population. The lesson, Hawkins concluded, is that the only way to force a mass change in behavior—and you could see this coming, I guess—is with regulation. A community has to first get serious and ban single-use take-out containers.

So the founders pivoted to the communities that were, in fact, doing that: universities.

Simon Fraser University, a 37,000-student institution on the outskirts of Vancouver, banned single-use plastics in 2021. It needed a system for students who wanted to grab a meal from the cafeteria and eat it in their dorm room. Sid Mehta, the university’s senior director of ancillary services, knew about the Reusables system; he called up Hawkins to hire them.

“The students,” Mehta told me, are hungry for this sort of system: “They’re already there.” For a simplified checkout system, Hawkins’ team attached a rugged RFID chip to each container: Presto, students could now check one out by waving it near a checkout terminal. Returning would be just as easy. To create an automated return bin, Reusables hired Jack Gralla, a lanky self-taught hardware hacker—he’d worked on everything from “solar roadways” to robotics. Gralla showed me the prototype, a bin with a lid crammed with micro-controllers (“There’s three computers inside”). It opens only if it detects an RFID chip, to prevent people from dropping in, say, trash or dog poop.

By the spring of 2024, the new system was working smoothly at Simon Fraser. Three return bins had collected containers from 7,389 meals. The university funds the system, and students only pay a penalty if they fail to return a dish. (So far, 97.5 percent have been returned.) Mehta has ordered more smart return bins to scatter around campus, and he expects they’ll process tens of thousands of meals in the next academic year.

Hawkins has inked deals with Pomona College and the University of Victoria and is in talks with a dozen others. With 27 million students, universities spend $24 billion a year on food. They can quickly establish their own no-plastics policy. A college, Hawkins notes, is its own fiefdom—“literally like its own city, right?”

A few other places are following suit. In June 2022, Canada passed a ban on many types of single-use plastics, including hot-food takeout from major grocery chains. A fight over the ban is playing out in the courts.

Jo-Anne St. Godard was watching this with interest; she’s the head of the Circular Innovation Council, a nonprofit that advocates for reducing single-use materials in Canada. She began talking to Ottawa’s major grocers and persuaded three—including Walmart—to try out the Reusables system for two years. They’re rolling it out this summer to several grocery stores.

Godard regaled me with the hurdles of getting the system designed: The grocers had to agree to standardized containers. (“Herding cats,” she says.) Everyone’s intense about ensuring the containers are meticulously cleaned. (“We get one person sick, this is over.”) And grocers wanted the containers to be microwavable, because people like to heat up their meals at home. RFID tags would get nuked, though, so Hawkins went back to Reusables’ QR code system.

Both Godard and Mehta argue that systems like Reusables’—companies like it are popping up worldwide—will be a staple of the future. Like every other system for reducing plastics, though, they will really take off only if policy pushes it along. “The conversation is shifting from shaming and blaming bad behavior to, ‘Oh, this is an economic development opportunity, and there’s money to be made,’” Godard said. The setup is basically the same as for the universities—Ottawa retailers and the Canadian government pay to run the system, and customers pony up only if they fail to return a container. Will retailers stay invested in the long run? Godard believes so. After all, they’re currently paying $700 million in annual fees to support the recycling program, so in the long run, “the more you put into reuse, the less you have to pay” for that very expensive service.

It’s not like reuse systems are perfect, mind you. A ton of electricity goes into making all those aluminum containers, and then some more goes into cleaning them every week. The CO2 balance evens out, it appears, only when these systems are in wide use. An analysis last year by McKinsey estimated that one might need to reuse a takeaway food container 200 times before its emissions are equal to those from creating and using 200 one-shot containers.

But of all the ways I saw to reduce single-use plastics, projects like Reusables had the fewest technical pitfalls. They don’t require major breakthroughs, just clever patching-together of existing tech. And I have little doubt society could adapt to reusable packaging. Hell, when our grandparents did it, they didn’t have RFID tags and micropayment systems. They just put the milk bottles back on the front porch. Surely modern technology is up to the challenge.

I realize it would be easier to imagine an unplastic future if we could point to one clear answer and one way forward. But, as some anti-plastic advocates told me, the diversity of these approaches is actually good. It spreads our bets. Plus, the solutions interlock. Of course, this plan is only a partial solution. Some plastics may be especially hard to quit, like the thin films that keep medical products sanitary. And then there’s the plague of microplastics, those infinitesimal bits that end up in our bodies, the soil, everywhere. A big chunk of them come from car tires and synthetic clothing—a whole other cluster of headaches. But the point is to move on all fronts toward fewer and fewer.

What’s next is, really, up to us: pressure on our elected officials, from presidential candidates on down to local city council members, to set up concrete targets and bans. Firm rules, market signals—that’s what will push companies to stop relying so heavily on one-time packaging, and let innovative projects and alternatives grow until they’re part of the fabric of daily life.

We may be up for that task. A survey last year by the conservation group Oceana found that strong majorities of Americans—affiliated with both major parties—supported reducing all single-use items, from bags to bottles to straws and more. No matter how many times or ways the people were asked, the majority always agreed: It’s time.

Getty Images, Reusables, Sway, Infinitum (illustration photo references); Getty Images (photograph backdrops)

Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected].