They're making cheap plastic shit because we love cheap plastic shit
No. They're making cheap plastic shit because their constant lobbying against common sense regulation and a living wage means that the cheap plastic shit is all most of us can afford.
explicit consumer prioritization of low costs above all other factors
Also known as a consumer prioritization of being able to survive without being TOO crushed by debt. You're really slathering the victim blaming on thick.
If consumers broadly demanded soda in glass bottles and expressed a willingness to pay the extra cost that this entails, every soda company would use glass
Bullshit. You have the power relationship backwards. The vast majority of humanity can't afford high quality sustainable packaging because the premium companies demand for it is ridiculous. Because they know they can as long as useful fools blame the consumers.
I'm not saying that you individually should be blamed for all environmental pollution
Sounds awfully close to just that, though.
we have to realize that companies are responding to the exact same incentives that we do.
They absolutely are not. A company has the option to make the packaging better at the same price in exchange for a couple cents less profit per bottle. A customer, who already doesn't have the vast resources with which to choose that a company has, would have to pay several times that, often several dollars, extra to get the "premium" glass bottle.
They're obviously operating at a much larger scale
That's like saying that the Sultan of Brunei's palace is obviously much larger than my apartment: while technically true, the difference of scale is so vast that any direct comparison is effectively meaningless.
they use cheap plastic shit for the exact same reason we do.
Nope. They produce cheap plastic shit to maximize profits because they're allowed to. We buy cheap plastic shit to minimize costs because we have to. Those are not the same reason.
If you're looking for policy solutions
Yes! This better be good..
a great option would be to introduce an externality tax on plastic so that this environmental cost is actually factored into the production and end price
Companies would just pass the cost on to consumers as always. If you do that AND price control, then we have something!
similar to carbon taxes
Another example of something that's a great idea in theory but end up not working as intended because it's too easy for big companies to avoid the intended consequences. Carbon taxes with no transferrable carbon credits and the aforementioned price control could work, though.
the moment you say the word 'tax' people's brains completely shut off,
Taxes work. You just need additional mechanisms too, to prevent the kind of fuckery companies get up to.