It's not just packaging, of course - it's also the materials used to produce things.
So-called environmentalists seem to want it both ways. Plastics were touted as an inexpensive alternative to paper, and in many cases metal. They do fulfill that role: we're wasting a lot less metal on small, cheap parts previously made of things like pewter, tin, zinc, nickel, etc. because plastic is not only cheaper, but frequently mechanically better: more durability, lubricity, etc.
The same for packaging: it weighs a lot less to use bubbles of air (styrofoam, or the manufactured bubbles) than wadded up paper.
But it's a tradeoff, you've got to accept one or the other, or a combination of both. It's totally reasonable - now that we're aware of the problem of microplastics - to scale back the use of plastic and revert to renewable, compostable, reusable packaging materials. We've also advanced technology enough that we should be able to figure out a new, better way to use paper-based products (or hemp!) and reduce the overall amount of plastics used in general, things like (maybe):
- hot-extruded plastic-hemp-fiber lattices for packaging padding
- origami paper packaging
- a return of reusable shipping packages (eg. perhaps standard sized thin-clad aluminum boxes that can be reused).
There are tradeoffs for all of these, like in fuel use. That poses a logistics opportunity, which would of course cost a lot of money to innovate and progress. And that's OK: people need to stop having a fatalist, minimalist mindset and start thinking grandly again. Bridges crossing rivers instead of barges would have never happened if people simply tried to make more efficient barges. That's the mindset we've fallen into - making better barges - instead of trying to think of the next step of progress.