Assuming that plastic ban was carried out (say in china) how would it affect imports and exports, what would the alternatives be, and would it even be feasible? If so, why has no nation even attempted a ban, even if slightly more expensive isn’t aluminium, glass or carton a way healthier alternative?
It’d be catastrophic.
It sounds like you’re mostly thinking of plastic containers though, which… well it’d still have to be carefully phased, because food comes in those, and it’d be better to still allow a little plastic film for safety seals, but yeah, it’d be entirely possible to switch back to bottles and cans. It’d probably cost like $0.10 more to produce per item or something trivial though, so corporations would never allow it.
A policy I like to daydream about is, after ending CO2 emissions, massively subsidizing lumber production until it makes sense to make disposable containers out of wood. All the wooden garbage in landfills would sequester carbon, so we could slowly get back to pre-industrial CO2 levels.
glass bottles you have problems with them weighing way more and breaking during shipping so for that to be “worth it” we’d have to come up with some way to equate the additional emissions and losses with whatever the plastic is doing.