I am literally coming from reading the article. I think we both fully agree that plastic pollution in the environment is a huge problem. In the meanwhile, global warming is also a huge problem, but what really is the packaging contribution to it? Even if you, as you say, replace all plastic with glass, what would be the impact from having to burn more fuel to transport it? It would probably not be great, considering that transportation is already a small part of the overall greenhouse emissions and that a lot of transportation happens in bulk, not individually packaged pieces. For this reasons, I think we should consider making a small sacrifice in carbon emissions in order to fight the large crisis that's happening in plastic waste. Yet, the article doesn't follow this line of reasoning at all and instead makes the following statements:
"Glass bottles, for instance, are much heavier than plastic so are far more polluting to transport."
"Paper bags tend to have higher carbon emissions than plastic bags"
"We are aware that [by switching from plastic to other materials] we may, in some cases, be increasing our carbon footprint.”
"All responsible retailers agree that climate change needs to be at the heart of their business, whether that is sourcing products or changing packaging."
I consider all of these statements pretty ignorant, at least without quantifying how big the climate impact would be in comparison to how big is the impact of the waste. Climate change simply isn't the end all be all of environment protection and I see a risk that the fight against tiny irrelevant contributions to climate change will push back against real steps to limit plastic waste. Frankly, the best solution in many places might be to just burn all trash en masse - all plastics are almost perfect fuel, at the high temperatures used in mass waste energy use most of the burn really cleanly and you produce electricity and heat as a bonus. Literally almost everything is better than letting used plastics wander around the environment. But that would really need a change of thinking, because, god forbid that CO2 is produced ... For some reason we went from one extreme of burning fossils with no regard for anything to the other one in a span of a few decades and it has consequences. Again, a palpable consequence is the diesel engines, we have literally people dying from diseases related to diesel soot just because the fight against CO2 from cars, at the level of a fraction of a percent of the whole man-made production, took precedence instead of public health.
The sand argument seems valid, I have no information about that, but the article does not even mention it. Again, I was just commenting on the article linked and it not being very logically sound.