If you want people to make stuff that is more easily recycled, then incentivize them to do so with your purchasing habits. Call your elected leadership and talk to them about creating tax incentives (either stick or carrot) that will encourage them to make more recyclable products. Capitalism works, but you just have to incentivize the right stuff.
I think you're being a bit idealistic here. Do you think that you can remove all war and violence by eliminating scarcity of resources? The last two wars that the US engaged in were not motivated out of scarcity. One evolved out of being attacked by an organization that was headquartered in Afghanistan, and the other was the direct result of a personal vendetta because one elected leader hated a particular autocrat.
And we are not at a point where people can have as much as they want of everything. Ergo, there will always be greed to contend with. From there creates competition. You aren't going to cure greed. You're better off merely harnessing it for the collective good, creating a system where altruists can also profit. My boy Elon Musk comes to mind as one of the latter.
Capitalism isn't optimal, but it's better than all the other bad options.
You are correct that capitalism represented an quantum leap from previous approaches when it evolved. And many great things have some to pass under capitalism.
Unfortunately, Capitalism is nothing more or less than an invert of how a socioeconomic system should be formed and executed. And that is why it will eventually meet it's doom.
It is NOT
designed to meet the needs of the people that participate in it. Rather, it is set up to
promote and allow competition. And from that competition, people will obtain various levels of personal wealth. How this affects the needs of the people is more or less beside the point. If the people benefit, that's fine. But if the vast majority of wealth or resources end up in the hands of a very few, at the expense of the many, that is a perfectly normal outcome and acceptable as well.
So- What would an alternative look like? Well, the planet has tinkered with a couple of alternatives. The Soviet Union and China tinkered with the dreaded 'Democratic Socialism'. From my perspective, both of them failed not because of the 'socialism' aspect, but because neither of them took Democracy seriously. And because they perhaps went too far in reducing the incentive of the people, and relied exclusively on national pride, which ebbs and flows. The one thing Capitalism has done better than anything is incentivize humanity.
Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are tinkering with Democratic Socialism in varying degrees right now, while not completely abandoning capitalism, and are producing a quality of life superior to that in the US in most respects. But they are smaller more homogenous countries. So while we might take lessons, no guarantee it would work for us.
One thing Norway does right though that few other true Democracies do, and we definitely should do, is grasp the very fundamental concept that the resources native to that country belong to
everyone, and should benefit everyone. Norway’s North Sea oil reserves
are owned by the country as a whole and not private corporations, and the income generated is distributed across the entire population.
That fundamental concept is what needs to be taken to a global mandate if we want to truly evolve. The worlds resources belong to everyone and should be use to maximum efficiency to benefit everyone.
Call your elected leadership and talk to them about creating tax incentives (either stick or carrot) that will encourage them to make more recyclable products. Capitalism works, but you just have to incentivize the right stuff.
What you are describing is not capitalism. It is the government manipulation of capitalism.