1) We don't cut down old growth trees to make paper products - we cut down fast-growth trees that are farmed for exactly this purpose. Cutting down these trees is not a problem, and in fact pulls some carbon out of the atmosphere because the trees captured it and the paper product end of life is usually getting buried where the carbon is mostly trapped.
2) You're ignoring that renewable energy can be used for production.
3) You're also ignoring that common plastics start with oil, which isn't just used for making plastic products. If you see a bunch of plastic bottles, you should also be thinking about the other oil products associated with them that got burned and turned into GHG.
The paper industry ranks #5 in carbon intensity and is responsible for something like 9% of global CO2 emissions.
Do you honestly think that industry uniformly manages their forestry in an environmentally friendly manner?
You could use renewables but the fact is that most of the input energy into paper mills is natural gas co-generation because you need both heat and electricity.
Petrochemicals are used in 90% of the regular every-day items we live our lives with. Clothing, furniture, our homes, cars, personal belongings… banning single use plastics isn’t going to change that.
I’d rather plastic waste in landfills than more CO2 emissions.
You really need to provide sources for claims like that. Here's the EPA saying that land use and forestry is a net carbon sink in the US [1]. If you're talking about international then that's a completely different conversation entirely, especially since the US exports about as much paper product as it imports, and unlike plastic, paper is actually recycled really well [2]. If you want to talk about countries that don't give a shit about the environment... not giving a shit about the environment, then there's really no conversation to be had here.
1) We don't cut down old growth trees to make paper products - we cut down fast-growth trees that are farmed for exactly this purpose. Cutting down these trees is not a problem, and in fact pulls some carbon out of the atmosphere because the trees captured it and the paper product end of life is usually getting buried where the carbon is mostly trapped.
2) You're ignoring that renewable energy can be used for production.
3) You're also ignoring that common plastics start with oil, which isn't just used for making plastic products. If you see a bunch of plastic bottles, you should also be thinking about the other oil products associated with them that got burned and turned into GHG.