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:

[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/735848489/plastic-has-a-big-c...

Dammit, I knew you would ask that.

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.