"If you could make a milk jug with 30 percent less material because it's mechanically better, think of the sustainability of that," he said. "You're using less plastic, less oil, you have less stuff to recycle, you have a lighter product that uses less fossil fuel to move it."
In effect this could help to reduce consumption as you suggest (and as I agree).
It seems like an education problem; I don't think it's ever been pointed out to me that the more-common ordering was intended to also express the favorability of the options (although it makes sense, looking at it).
Does anyone know how recycled plastics stack up against new plastic once you consider the energy used in the entire recycling chain?
I am too. I really despise that they push the burden onto the customer, instead of hiring people or robots to pick bottles or other shit out of the trash stream and recycle it. As a homeowner, I'm paying them for trash service. If there's a cleaner way (recycling - which isn't necessarily any greener, as you pointed out) , the waste management industry should be forced to do it for the greater good, just like coal plants are forced to run their exhaust through scrubbers to remove pollutants. They shouldn't profit, or burn millions more gallons of diesel driving huge recycling trucks around, by forcing (or guilting) us to do unpaid labor.
If you don't create the plastic bottle you don't have to figure out how to undo its pollution.
We probably can't avoid all plastic use, but we're orders of magnitude above minimal use, considering plastic didn't exist for most of human history, and most current use doesn't improve anyone's quality of life.