> which one wants

It's unfortunate you're making wild assumptions like this. Hopefully our discussion can be productive despite this.

Because first off I absolutely do want us to get rid of as much single-use stuff as we can. My issue is with your goal/metric, not with disposable plastic elimination.

> that a family needing wash plastic sports

I didn't say needing. You missed the entire point of that example.

Granted the lower class part was unnecessary as anyone could reuse, but I just have found people with higher incomes to be more picky about stuff. I don't care if my utensils match or look nice, I care if they function.

It was also certainly not to justify the existence of disposable cutlery. The entire point here was that the cutlery is disposable not due to anything other than the fact that it's cheap and people want to throw it out.

If metal forks were cheap people would throw them out too.

The KFC was only mentioned to mention a particular kind of plastic cutlery, because not all plastic cutlery is equal in durability. This kind (also popular in many other restaurants) prioritizes function over form, while there's fancy looking plastic forks that break after one use.

> Exhaling CO2 is a mutually beneficial process.

Only until we produce too much of it, which we are doing.

> To say that returning the environment to a natural order is an impossible goal is just a deflection of the argument.

No it's not a deflection, it's a criticism of the goal you stated. It's a bad goal, we can't achieve it, and it's so obvious we can't achieve it that you immediately made concessions and switched to qualify it.

> returned to a natural, thriving condition, like Chernobyl. T

Chernobyl is an example of how quickly nature can adapt once left alone, not an example of something returning to it's pre-human state. Chernobyl is even today still polluting the environment and causing problems. Yes nature can adapt, nature be crazy like that, but no that doesn't mean that there's no impact.

> To discount the hard as impossible is a weak tactic which keeps us locked into actually solving problems

Keeps us locked into actually solving problems? I'm gonna assume you meant the opposite, please correct me if you actually meant what you said here. You also did that a few times later on.

> some new meme of the day like upcycling

Or like "product longevity"?

> We are well beyond the point in which our efforts can be inefficient and ineffective

I 100% agree, which is why some new meme like buying razors from antique stores isn't going to solve the problem. Like why replacing one environment-harming material with another isn't going to do anything.

I mean is your razor the only thing you use? Do you use collected rainwater and nothing else to shave with? What do you do with your waste hair?

You need to consider more than just whether you're chucking something in the trash. You need to consider what you're washing down the drain. You need to consider what you're using up and where those things came from.

You need to consider... your environmental impact. A wildly subjective and hard to define thing because this is a hard issue. But just because it's hard doesn't mean we should give up and use shitty meaningless metrics which encourage waste instead.