Sometimes. If it's economically viable. Sometimes many decades later.
Take PCBs as an example. Their absurd longevity means nearly all of it is still around, causing a long list of harms, and will probably continue for decades more. Long after production ceased.
In that context:
* Economic viability is a matter of time. Have commercially viable fusion reactors? You better recalculate your econ viability all over.
* PCBs: Nanotechnology, robotics, AI
What do you want people to do? Stop living their lives and give up tech? To what level? Can we keep the wheel?
That's not how things work in reality.
Just saying that because some people don't understand that there are good reasons to give up those clumsy wheel things, they ain't the bees knees.
In the post nuclear war movie 'Threads' there is a quick loss of education and language in the nuclear winter years. A girl is shown with a record player and records, this scene is about how the girl has no idea what this is for, the very culture of music is not conceivable, it has been lost.
All tech is given up in the apocalypse. As is language and civilisation. It becomes a life of harsh survival. Violence becomes the universal language that everyone understands, that's it.
This is still an outcome our politicians have not gone to rule out for us. With our taxes we pay for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons to be pointed at us.
If we just give up the cult of militarism then we will be fine.
Exactly. You can spread doom as much as you want and it won't help. You won't get a critical mass to listen to you. They won't change their behavior based on some event that will most likely happen in the far future. Sad, but true.
As a species, we don't have a history of planning and preventing. Instead we have always been adapting to change as things happen. This is essentially the same.
If technology caused a problem, technology can also solve it.