One - you are giving humans and plastic a lot of benefit of doubt. Time and again, it is demonstrated that human convenience trumps environmental concerns. So governments can have state-of-the-art recycling facilities but getting people to co-operate is an uphill challenge.
Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal. The world is rapidly moving towards sustainable sources of energy and thus energy consumption is becoming less of a concern. Glass, cucumbers etc can be sustainably disposed off or recycled but plastic can't be - at least not all kinds currently in use/production.
And the cucumber example is a little disingenuous. A lot of the cucumber product is fast moving and fly off the shelves rapidly. Number of cucumbers being actually consumed is >>> than the number of cucumbers being spoiled. But the environment has to deal with sum total of all the plastic used to wrap the cucumber - even those which were consumed rapidly and would have not been spoiled at all.
>Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal.
If you just burn the wrapper in your fireplace, it'll produce less than 6g of CO2. We're talking about the equivalent of half a teaspoon of gasoline. Growing and transporting a cucumber produces about 1kg of CO2. The wrapper is not the problem.
But we want the cucumber, and any leftover cucumber will decompose to nothing - it doesn't require any specialised waste processing. The 1kg of CO2 to grow and transport the cucumber is a spent cost, but half a teaspoon of gasoline for every single cucumber is an obscene environmental cost.
The same argument applies to your steak - the environmental cost of the steak is irrelevant, because the steak is the product we want, and again, leftover steak disappears without trace in very short order. The issue is the packaging, which we don't want but hangs around for half a millenia if disposed of irresponsibly.
The goal of this part of the initiative is to deal with that "last mile" problem of irresponsible waste processing, because we can't trust people to dispose of plastics properly. That will inevitably have a knock on effect on the rest of the supply chain, because now companies can't sell products which use single use plastics in that area, so they'll look at alternative ways of packaging their product.
That might result in some products having shorter shelf lives, but those products don't require complex waste management practices - they just move to different levels of the food chain.
The other environmental issues such as the transport cost are an entirely separate concern which aren't impacted by this move at all.
One - you are giving humans and plastic a lot of benefit of doubt. Time and again, it is demonstrated that human convenience trumps environmental concerns. So governments can have state-of-the-art recycling facilities but getting people to co-operate is an uphill challenge.
Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal. The world is rapidly moving towards sustainable sources of energy and thus energy consumption is becoming less of a concern. Glass, cucumbers etc can be sustainably disposed off or recycled but plastic can't be - at least not all kinds currently in use/production.
And the cucumber example is a little disingenuous. A lot of the cucumber product is fast moving and fly off the shelves rapidly. Number of cucumbers being actually consumed is >>> than the number of cucumbers being spoiled. But the environment has to deal with sum total of all the plastic used to wrap the cucumber - even those which were consumed rapidly and would have not been spoiled at all.