Extremely well written post. I agree wholeheartedly with your findings. Plastic has actually not been around for that long, especially in the ordinary household. As a child growing up in the 60's, my parents were married after WW2 and as children themselves, had gone through the great depression. The thing is, we didn't have plastic, I think the only plastic in the house was the Bakelite light switches. We packed our groceries into paper bags, our lunches were wrapped in paper, our milk was in glass bottles as were a myriad of other food stuffs. We simply didn't have plastic. In fact I remember when we DID get it, mum and dad bought a small chest freezer, and I clearly remember seeing a plastic bag for the first time as they packed meat into it and sucked out the air. Next was milk tokens, before that we would wrap money in paper and leave in the milk bottle to be collected. So this monumental tidal wave of plastic consumerism and waste is not centuries old and already we are at critical levels of overload. Scary.