I absolutely agree. But the problem is not only one of consumer mindset but an economic reality. Our economic system, as currently constructed, would (will) collapse if (when) we stop creating new stuff from virgin raw materials.
Had a chat with the dock supervisor at the county solid waste unit last week. He told me that there is no market for glass bottles, barely a market for soft plastic containers (milk, water, soda, etc), no market for heavier plastic (TV shells, etc), a minimal market for cardboard, no market for waste consumer electronics. Basically the county has to pay someone to haul most of this stuff away.
Some say that free market of recyclers will solve recycling issue. I call this nonsense, free market is not suited to recycle stuff by design (because there is no incentive to recycle materials with no demand without government action).
Few examples to illustrate he point. Recently I tried to recycle or refill (if possible) few toner cartridges. Toner shops said they only deal with non-refilled cartridges and cartridges that are in demand (so most old cartridges goes to waste and are not reused).
Another example. NY Times paper few years ago write about electronics recycling business and problems with it. One problem was a cascaded resell of recycling services/trash (so papers looks good but recycling is not done), other was recycling of parts that are no longer in demand (like CRTs). When CRTs monitors were popular, cycle went like this: materials for glass + lead + manufacturing -> CRTs -> CRTs recycling for raw materials -> manufacturing... Now CRTs are not popular, there is no demand and all this stuff is going to dumps. Free market has no real solution to this problem, it will only increase it.
We are pretty much screwed when only plastic bags are said to cause massive issues in environment. Solutions would be to use less stuff (with massive economic consequences), include costs of environment into product cost or similar.