I find the "reduce, reuse, recycle" slogan misleading.
Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly important issue.
I think you are forgetting about time. If the rate of stuff needing to get recycle is lower, then there is more time to recycle. If there the rate is too high then the facilities are overwhelmed and resort to less optimal strategies.
It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working. People on the average are increasing their consumption, not reducing it. That means the actual problem — the waste at the end of the pipeline — is growing every year.
Waste management is the actual problem that needs to be solved. "Reduce and reuse" can be a part of the solution, but people are not doing enough voluntarily to make it a major part.
I'm genuinely curious about your position, it's interesting.
But I can't figure it out what it'd look like in practice, might be hangover, might be I need more caffeine, whatever it is, it's on me. Don't read following as "you're saying X and thats silly!"
(A) Are consumption rates in general unsustainable?
(B) If (A) is no, are consumption rates of specific items unsustainable? For example, is the legislation you're thinking of like the deprecation of plastic bags for paper? Or something that covers a much wider amount of consumption?
(C) If (A) is "yes" or (B) is "more global", at huge scales like an economy, legislating quotas or rationing or anything at all, in practice pushes activity onto black markets.
If the concern is changing individual behavior, and individual behavior isn't changing on it's own sufficiently, what sort of legislation would change it?
Maybe it's because people spread FUD about the effectiveness of "reduce and reuse" instead of convincing others that "reduce and reuse" has value as a concept.
> It's misleading because it focuses on actions that are clearly not working
Of course it is not working. The bloat and planned obsolescence of "modern software" is legendary. I had to replace the hard drive on an older computer becsuse Win 10 is slow as a dog on it, even with LTSC version and even with most of the crap disabled. And making things require the incompatible latest and greatest instead of fixing things (hello Google) , does not help either.
In addition to the volume issue, there's the composition issue. When I was a kid, we recycled all our flint cores. Well, not quite that far back... Milk came in glass bottles, and the person who delivered the bottles of milk to our house picked up the empties to take back to the dairy. There were also steel cans for canned food and soft drinks (which eventually rusts away), and of course lots of other glass bottles. Now more and more of those kinds of things come in plastic, of which little gets recycled. And cans are often aluminum, which doesn't rust away.
Furniture was wood and fabric and (maybe) springs, with a little bit of pressboard (which was itself recycled paper and textile, usually used on the back of desks etc.). Now furniture is particleboard (made from sawdust), with lots of glue and some kind of plastic veneer if it's in a place that shows. Wood is genuinely recyclable (or re-usable as antiques!); I don't think particleboard is recyclable, although I could be wrong.
Automobiles were steel, fabric, glass and copper wire (with rubber insulation); plus of course rubber tires. Now they are those things plus a lot more plastic. Tires, both then and now, are essentially un-recyclable (although occasionally turned into artificial reefs).
I could go on, but there are probably more authoritative (= better) studies of this. But I suspect in general that we have lots less recyclable "stuff" these days than we used to.
When I grew up in Sweden, soda was sold in standardized glass bottles. All brands used the same bottles and they just put paper labels on. You'd return the glass bottles for a deposit, they'd take them in, remove the label, wash then and refill them. You could tell how old the glass bottle you were drinking out of was by how scratched the label was.
In the 90's, they were all replaced by PET bottles. We were told at the time that this was because the oil used in the plastic bottles was still less than the extra oil used to ship the heavy glass bottles back and forth.
So the idea of reducing consumption is misleading, the real solution is to reduce consumption (via the law forcing quotas on manufacturers and rationing on consumers)
Everything that is manufactured will eventually become waste that must be disposed of responsibly. The overall volume of manufacturing only goes up if we leave it to the market, and there is no serious political will to legislate it down. That leaves us with an ever-increasing volume of waste that must be dealt with, making waste management an increasingly important issue.