Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco.

This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plastic wrap for retail packaging.

Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations.

The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.

Banning stuff is rarely my preferred solution. My take on producer responsibility is that producers should be prepared to take their stuff BACK - meaning, if someone turns up at their headquarters (or some more reasonable location) with a dump truck full of, for example, empty coffee cups, they should be required to accept the delivery and find a way to dispose of it, paying for landfill if necessary, but hopefully something more constructive. I just want the cost of disposal to come straight back to them.

The coffee cup example is contrived, but let's say every producer of plastic zip ties was required to receive returned plastic zip ties each year, equal to the volume that they sold the previous year?

>Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations.

>The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.

That is a false dilemma. You might as well start adding uranium to baby powder because "Uranium Co spends so much money on cancer research the real trade off isn't uranium baby powder or regular baby powder, it's uranium baby powder or oncology".

I invite you to spend some time in a pediatric oncology unit, look at the mind-boggling variety of single-use plastics consumed over the course of the day, and research their manufacturers and origins. The results will be more illuminating than some dramatic hypothetical.

And? They would be using something else as packaging if not for plastics. People are resourceful like that.

Yeah, perhaps they can use catgut or something as a replacement for central lines. Waxed paper is well known to have the same antimicrobial attributes as hydrophobic plastics. All but for the greed of Exxon...

To scare and threaten people with a near collapse of the medical device industry, if packaging manufacturers aren't allowed to operate unregulated, sounds like borderline lobbyist desperation tactics.

I hope we as Humans are better than this.

> This is just naive and irrational.

Ignoring the unnecessary ad hominem, this is as irrational, as baning leaded fuel or asbestos. Plastic will be the defining geological remainder of our human epoch. We are physically destroying the planet and our own healthy for the sake of wire buckles. [0]

You claim this to be naive, yet this is the very proposal currently approved by 560 members of the EU parliament, in the new European Union Single-Use Plastics Directive 2019/904 [1] [2]

Arguably the original proposal was ridiculously watered down so that only a short list of single-use plastic products are banned (likely due to industry lobbying).

However, make no mistake, a ban is coming it is not a question of if but of when. The quicker the Coca-Cola's and Pepsico's and Nestlé's of the world wake up to this, the less they will hurt their bottom line with the overdue reckoning of consumer backlash and health related class suits.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Plastic+endocrine+disr...

[1] https://time.com/5560105/european-union-plastic-ban/

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/LSU/?uri=uriserv:...

> this is as irrational, as baning leaded fuel or asbestos

It's apples to oranges. Nobody really needs leaded fuel or asbestos.

But single-use plastics has a lot of reasonable applications, like ones I gave above: multi-use things which are effectively single-use.

> You claim this to be naive, yet this is the very proposal currently approved by 560 members of the EU parliament, in the new European Union Single-Use Plastics Directive 2019/904

If MP were really smart people, we would already colonized Mars and other planets. They are just regular dudes who are pushed by voters, by industry and so on.

> However, make no mistake, a ban is coming it is not a question of if but of when

I'm certain of that. And that ban will do more harm then good. Like for example, people might start bying expensive multi-use things for single-use applications.