So, a big part of the profitability of oil and other fossil fuels, is that they’ve found a use for just about every by product, so instead of dumping unused distillates or ash in to rivers and getting their asses sued to high heaven for killing everything down stream, they just sell it to you and tell everyone else what to do with their industrial waste. (before the introduction of the internal combustion engine gasoline type oil products were dumped in to rivers, hence all the stories about rivers catching on fire).
Plastics and polymers were a godsend for these companies in the 50s 60s and 70s as regulations on environmental impacts started to get taken seriously. Plastic helped these companies skirt around accounting for waste and pollution of their byproducts by getting consumers to buy them. Suddenly, it’s not the oil company dumping ton after ton of refinery waste in to rivers, now it’s you average every day consumer dumping a plastic bag here and styrofoam container there, and municipal governments footing the bill for burying it all .
This goes hand in hand with the “please recycle” stuff, suggesting to the average person that if they’re worried about all this oil byproduct everywhere, well that’s your fault for not putting it in the blue bin to make it go away.
It’s a systematic gaslighting of the average person to convince them that this mounting catastrophe of oil pollution is actually their fault. Out right banning of oil derived plastic packaging (excluding medical stuff) would probably make significant strides to breaking the backs of the oil companies that are feeding the climate catastrophe