Plus, a placebo for dumb consumers who thing a bigger package means better or more. It reminds me of a story from when I worked in manufacturing process 20 years ago. A major vendor of sensors and control hardware was demoing a new line of sensors. The plant manager in talking with the vendor said, "These are great but I think they are too lite, people will pick them up and assume they are junk." When the vendor released the product line, they had added a weight to each by sticking a small piece of heavy metal in each one with the sole purpose of conveying weight to the customer.
That 'revolutionary approach' is making one of the other things that we can recycle very easily cheaper. Plastics are wildly cheap and durable enough for their use. But paper (kinda recyclable), glass (very recyclable), metal (very recyclable) are kind of expensive vs plastic. Taxing it would create a weird perverse thing. The real thing that needs to happen is the remaining 3 things we can recycle easily need to be cheaper. When nat gas became cheaper vs coal (which is really cheap) the energy companies very quickly started switching over to NG.
How do you imagine those things "become" cheaper without things like taxing? Just suggesting that the only way forward is to "make them cheaper" seems to amount to "do nothing to fix the problem, just wait until someone invents some magic solution". What if a magic solution is not possible, or at least noone finds it?
In most terms if you constrain supply price goes up. If you make cheaper to make and get and supply goes up it becomes cheaper. Waving the 'just tax it' flag does not actually make things cheaper or better. It just shifts costs and removes capital from the system. It is the broken window fallacy. If you just spend money on 'this other thing' 'this other great thing will happen'.
Getting tax law and pushing things to work are a delicate balance. Recycling is a good example of it. We are paying people money to 'recycle' plastic. When the reality is only 5-10% of plastics can be recycled. There is no magic fix. The basic problem is economics. Plastics are cheaper to use. Because they are a byproduct of something everyone needs. That is not going to change. If you tax it here they can find some other country willing to crack the oil and do it for the cheap way. You have to make other options cheaper. That usually comes thru volume.
