My town’s recycling center separates glass by color, but can’t sell it to be made into new glass. There’s not actually a market for old glass. The town sells all the glass to be used as “clean fill” when paving roads. (They may have stopped making us sort by color, but the issue is whether it was worth continuing made the quarterly newsletter.)
The original ad by (i think) Coca-Cola when they introduced plastic bottles showed a women with kids loading bags of groceries into the back of her station wagon, and then a bag falling over and the bottles bouncing around the back of her car as she drove home. The massage was clear, “these new bottles won’t break and leave an unholy mess behind”. They are also lighter than glass which means less fuel is burned transporting them.
And plastics are pretty benign in land fills. They take up space, like anything else in landfills, but they don’t cause any special problems. And bacteria are already evolving to eat plastic. I don’t think plastic is really a problem. Using up the oil to make it, on the other hand…
The problem is “single use”, not “plastic”.
Tangentially related, i pay extra to get glass glasses. They have superior optics and i see better wearing glass. I’ve broken many many pairs of glasses, and only twice broken a lens. The tempered glass is tough. Usually, the lens can be fitted into repaired or new frames.
(There may be health issues with plasticizers leaking out of plastics into food, but that doesn’t seem to be the issue of this thread.)