When I was a kid almost all packaged foods came in tins or glass containers. So did sodas/soft drinks. Biscuits and cookies came in large tins or cardboard boxes and the grocer weighed out what you wanted and put the contents into a paper bag. The greengrocer would put your fruit in a paper bag and you, the shopper, would place those paper bags into a string shopping bag.

Supermarkets, which were just coming into vogue, either didn't offer shopping bags or if they did they were made of paper.

Large items came in cardboard boxes and heavy items came in timber crates, fruit came packed in low grade wooden boxes which were later great for storing things in. Heavy machinery was often crated in large wooden containers.

Toys were made of either wood or metal plate or diecast. ...But rarely of plastic. Plastic LEGO wasn't available, instead we kids played with wonderful Meccano made of steel!

By comparison, plastics were few and far between and confined to a certain class of objects such as ballpoint pens, drawing set squares (often celluloid), radio cabinets (Bakelite), but TV sets cabinets were still fabricated from wood (3-ply and or Masonite) although the dials and knobs were plastic.

Despite the current whingeing, the introduction of certain plastics was a great benefit, for example, from the mid 1950s onwards when PVC replaced perishable vulcanized rubber as electrical insulation in household wiring, electrical fires became much less common. That was a great advance forward.

All this happened not that long ago. Things started to go really pear-shaped around the mid 1960s early '70s and by the 1980s it seemed that just about everything came in shrink-wrapped polyethylene or such.

Now I can no longer buy, say a galvanized bucket, instead I have to buy crappy plastic ones that do not last—not long ago I bought three at the supermarket and the handle fell off one even before I got it home. Large plastic bins I use to put things in are made of polyethylene or similar and after the plasticizer bleeds out they becomes brittle and crack then fall to bits—it really is a damn pain this stuff just doesn't last.

Plastics have their place. One of the great problems is that they are being abused in the ways we use them, back to those storage containers for a moment: if made of a good high grade durable plastic that's also thick enough not to break in normal use they'd last a lifetime after which they could be disposed of properly, instead they are deliberately designed to fail after little or no use. We've now reached the stage where these containers sold for domestic use are not fit for purpose.

I'm of the opinion we need to tax the shit of plastic when it's used in items that either don't have an appropriate lifespan (i.e. not made sufficiently durable), and or where suitable alternative material exist—for instance wood, metal and glass for bottles etc.

The argument that, say, glass is dangerous and plastic is safer doesn't hold water. Even in my lifetime I've seen a society that ran on glass and it ran OK! In cases where plastic has to be the preferred option then simply tax the shit out if it. People will either make do with cheaper glass or they'll pay a premium for plastic. Plastic drink bottles could have deposits on them so high that no one would ever think of disposing them other than to return them for the deposit.

The only real problem in bringing plastics under control is opposition from greedy corporations that have nothing other than profit in mind. The first thing we citizens must to do is to limit their ability to lobby government on such matters.