It should be obvious that you can’t just stop using plastic straws and pat yourself on the back for saving the earth. The much bigger problem is packaging, and this article in Scientific American has some ideas for how it could be tackled, and how it has been in a few countries not called the United States.
Legislators could make laws that incentivize and facilitate recycling, like the national bottle deposit and bag tax bills that were proposed in 2009. These bills would have created a nationwide five-cent deposit on plastic bottles and other containers, and a nonrefundable five-cent charge on plastic bags at checkout. The U.K. launched a similar charge on all single-use grocery bags in 2015 and announced a nationwide bottle deposit requirement in March of this year. Within six months of the plastic bag charge being in place, usage dropped over 80 percent. Similarly, in Germany, where a nationwide bottle bill was put in place in 2003, recycling rates have exceeded 98 percent. In the U.S. these actions would go a long way toward recovering the estimated $8 billion yearly economic opportunity cost of plastic waste.
Other actions could include a ban or “opt-in” policy on single-use items like plastic straws. That is, single-use plastic items would not be available or only upon request. A small tweak like this can lead to huge changes in consumer behavior, by making wastefulness an active choice rather than the status quo. Such measures were recently adopted by several U.S. cities, and are under consideration in California and the U.K.
Another, somewhat obvious, idea would be to tax packaging. This would raise some revenue while also nudging companies toward solutions that reduce, reuse, or recycle the packaging to avoid the tax. Some other tax could be reduced to offset this new one, if that seems critically important.