Here's [0] a write-up from NPR, with links to several studies comparing the life cycle costs of plastic and alternative materials, and noting that from a climate change perspective, plastic comes out ahead in most analyses, but that plastic has much larger cleanup costs:
I'll have to dig back through my paper notebooks going back over about 20 years. (My ex-wife was a virtue signaler, and I had started to be sceptical. I used a university library, but I don't live near a university any more.)
Probably there's a lot better research to be had now, refined! Updated! With 20% lower error bounds!
But I doubt very much the conclusions have changed, especially given the world's dependence on Chinese manufacturing and China's dependence on coal.
