Continue to moan, Pete! If it begins to irritate people, the more likely they are to think about the problem and maybe they will start to moan about it, too.
Our societies are so short-sighted in trying to meet consumer needs at the lowest competitive price and do not ever look at life-cycle cost of the product. Things like the cost of disposing of plastic or paper, and the replacement cost of reclaiming land destroyed in the production of a product should be a required cost when determining the price of a product! If not, there really is no cost for those things from a manufacturer's viewpoint.
Of course products will be expensive, but that means people will decide whether or not something is worth buying. Since they are the ones to pay the ultimate cost anyway, at least it would be on the price tag.
If the plastic doll house for a child to play with for ten days is a thousand of whatever monetary unit, maybe something less costly would be a better option. Hiding costs only hides it at the retail level because someone, some day, will pay for the floating trash islands one way or another. Like the day the last edible fish is pulled out of the ocean and remaining humanity starts paying the overdue bill.
Thanks Willy. Exactly that people say they care, but seem to do so only in the moment. Sadly bad decisions always come back to bite us in the ass.
One thing Nature gave us too much of is the ability to decide that something we know is important, is not actually important, and bury it away in memory so we won't have to make a conscious decision. Called denial.