The question no one seems to be asking about plastics

Yes, yes, we know, plastic is the bete noir de nos jours. It infects Gaia and all that. And yet there’s a terribly important question that just no one at all seems to be even asking, let alone answering:

Single-use plastic plates, cutlery and a range of other items will be banned in England from October, to curb their “devastating” impact on the environment, the government has confirmed.

The Department for the Environment said the ban will also cover single-use plastic bowls, trays and certain types of polystyrene cups and food containers.

However, the move will not apply to plates, trays and bowls used as packaging in what the Department called “shelf-ready pre-packaged food items”.

From October this year, the public will not be able to buy the banned items from retailers, takeaways or food vendors.

As we’ve noted before this is to be failing Chesterton’s Fence.

Which brings us to that question not being asked - why did we all start using plastics? There must be some reason. Presumably some benefit gained from their use - we’ve not gone out to deliberately infest Gaia after all, even if that might be a side effect of what we’ve done.

So, what was or is that benefit? And, having identified that, what is the value of that as against the value of not having the infestation? Or, the same point the other way around, what are the costs of not using plastic as against the benefits of not doing so? Clearly there are costs to not - otherwise we’d not need laws to ban it.

Unless we know why we started using plastic we can’t work out whether we should stop doing so. But that does seem to be the very thing that no one is investigating.