This is true, but there are escape hatches to this, so it's not a true paradox. A few examples: If we could get a glass that melts at a lower temperature and i

This is true, but there are escape hatches to this, so it's not a true paradox. A few examples: If we could get a glass that melts at a lower temperature and is more impact resistant, we'd be halfway there. Also, if we could easily melt down the plastic without degradation, that would be nice as well. Also, if we could easily dissolve the plastic in a solvent that wasn't highly toxic. That would be great too. Basically if we could make the containers out something that makes it easy to reshape and reuse, we could convince more people to collect most of the waste. It would be more valuable as an input to many different crafting or manufacturing processes. But also, wood is kind of polymer, and chemical is pretty similar to plastic, and there are a lot of different kind of plastics out there, they are all pretty different, so it's a bit hard to generalize in this area.