Wine and olives also cost more than milk and eggs. You can package milk in glass bottle 5 percent of the weight of the product made at thousands of degrees fro

Wine and olives also cost more than milk and eggs. You can package milk in glass bottle 5 percent of the weight of the product made at thousands of degrees from burning fossil fuels or you can package it in an inert HDPE container, that is processed at several hundred degrees and weighs say 0.5% of the product contained within. lighter packaging means less fuel burned to ship it. Lower processing temperatures means less fuel burned to make it. Ethylene polymerized into plastic for milk jugs doesn't end up in the air as CO2. Plastic feed stocks directly compete with fuel feed stocks. The less fuel we need to burn to ship things the more carbon is kept out of the atmosphere and the more carbon made into plastic that is stable when buried for thousands of years the less ends up in the air. You can make a lighter foam egg carton for less cost, that better protects the eggs than a paper one. Paper is no more a natural material than plastic. The manufacturing process releases hydrogen sulfide, contaminates water and when the paper rots the toxic dyes in ink printed on it is unbound and free to leach into the environment. Paper cups are coated with persistent waxed and plastics that migrate once the cup that supported them is gone. White paper products are bleached and brown paper is produced with harmful chemicals including even flame retardants at times. What is cheapest, lightest and most stable is usually also the most environmentally friendly thing.