Forget climate change for a second (there are plenty of pundits online willing to help you), and the next most serious environmental crisis you can probably think of is plastic pollution in the ocean. You might be familiar with this great Shakespearean tragedy through pictures of the infamous Pacific Garbage Patch, a beach covered with plastic waste, or a beached pelican who choked on a straw. Even if not, consider that 300 tons of plastic are produced every year and that we definitely let at least 5% of that slip into our waterways (or let it fall right into the ocean). Activists across the world are working to ban certain types of plastics like grocery bags and straws, sparking legislative skirmishes nationwide to enact or block plastic bans.

With all this attention, plastic itself starts to seem like a villain – or a misunderstood hero meant to overcome all odds. Certainly, the bottle caps and half-decomposed pieces choking and piercing the intestines of ocean wildlife is villainous, as are the pieces that poison the fish that make up a large portion of Earth’s food supply. On the other hand, spending all this energy on bans, when we don’t have obvious, accessible replacements for the things we’re banning, are some steep odds that would make for an entertaining hero’s journey. But plastic is more complicated than that. In this gritty world of waste, nothing is black and white. Single-use plastic, not plastic in general, is the cause of our litter crisis. Most single-use plastics should be eliminated, but in some cases it would be more sustainable to replace some products with a plastic version.

The argument against replacing all plastics is simple: there are certain types of plastics we cannot live without. Plastics tend to be strong and durable yet lightweight, making them great replacements for strong, durable, and heavy materials in cars and airplanes. When airplanes and cars are lighter, they become more fuel efficient, and reduce carbon emissions. Plastics tend to be impermeable to common fluids and gases, making them great sealers. In a medical setting, syringes and tubing keep contaminants and medications from escaping to contaminate and medicate bystanders. Since plastic is cheap to produce (relative to other impermeable materials), these items can be thrown away with each use, to eliminate the chance that a subsequent patient could get infected by contaminants from the patient that originally had the tubing. (Medical sanitation is a great reason to keep some single-use plastics around. Due to the bio-hazard, most of these plastics are meticulously collected and properly disposed of, probably by incineration.)

Littered plastic is more hazardous than your average cardboard-box-in-the street due to its material properties. To manufacture, many plastics require potentially toxic or hormonal chemicals like BPA, which leach out of a plastic object into its surroundings after wear-and-tear, heat, or time. A hundred lonely water bottles abandoned on the ocean floor for a decade might leak chemicals into the water, causing health issues for nearby creatures, possibly mutating a crab or two into a fearsome, apocalyptic beast. In addition, plastic is relatively impermeable and sturdy, both mechanically and molecularly. Artificial polymers are highly stable materials that decay more slowly than organic compounds and other man-made materials like paper. When they’re left on the forest floor, they take longer to disappear, increasing the chances that some animal will choke, skewer, or suffocate on it. Chemical leaching and zombie-like resilience make most abandoned plastics a fearsome hunk of litter, or even a resident of a landfill.

Replacing single-use plastic, and even some non-plastics, with multiple-use plastics would decrease environmental impact significantly. How crazy is it that we manufacture these plastics that can withstand the wind and rain and heat and last multiple decades, yet we make them into bags, boxes, utensils, and more that are used once and thrown away? We probably got into this habit because plastic is cheap to produce in bulk. Easy come, easy go. It’s cheap to form into that spork shape you so desire, and as a spork it works as well as any spork could, but since it’s so cheap to just make another spork, why bother keeping track of the first spork?

While you can easily turn a single-use spork into a multiple-use spork by throwing it in the dishwasher and keeping it for your next 5-year-old birthday party, making a plastic item “re-usable” is more complicated than just using it again. One major concern for kitchen wares: you should use a plastic that is safe for contact with food and drink. Solo cups and other plastic party cups are made of polystyrene, which is fine for one cold drink, but hot drinks (and hot water from the dishwasher) create the risk that chemicals will leach into your next beverage. A reusable plastic container has to be shaped so that it’s easy to clean, as well as sturdy enough to withstand several rounds of use. You’re not going to carry a Nestlé water bottle with you on a hike through Death Valley because, if you drop it, the force of the fall might crush the bottle and push all the water out into the dirt. That thing isn’t built for reuse.

When plastic is designed for reuse, though, it can have hundreds of lives before it needs to retire. A Nalgene (or whatever your water bottle brand is) is made of plastic that doesn’t leach easily with age or heat, and is mechanically sturdy to last several hundred (or thousand) refills.

Despite the difficulty of redesigning a single-use plastic item to a multiple-use plastic item (which will most likely be made from a different type of plastic), a true multiple-use plastic (say a spork again) will decrease waste doubly. First, each time the spork is re-used, it replaces a disposable spork that would have newly manufactured and tossed. Second, making something reusable makes it easier to properly dispose of when it is done. In order to use the spork multiple times, there must be a process in place to recollect and reprepare used sporks. Thus, when a re-usable spork has truly had its last supper, there is already a system for collecting sporks that will increase the likelihood that it ends up in the spork graveyard and not the landfill. Whether that system is your mom’s dishwasher or a Big Spork-bankrolled collection service doesn’t matter. Anything that’s reusable is potentially more valuable than a disposable equivalent, as there is a chance it can be refurbished, reused, and resold. Even if the spork collectors won’t take a broken spork for sprucing up, someone is more likely to hang on to a reusable spork for a few weeks to wait for the spork collectors to show up. They hold out hope that it is still valuable for reuse. Even before the spork collector comes, the user has thought about the reusable spork more than they ever would have about a disposable spork. Maybe that translates to higher rates of proper spork disposal.

In the same vein, items that are not traditionally made of plastic can be more sustainable if a plastic version makes it more reusable. A produce delivery service in the UK reportedly made its packing more sustainable by switching out cardboard boxes with plastic boxes. Cardboard manufacturing requires extensive treatment and heating of the paper fibers, which leads to a good deal of emissions. While plastic production also leads to emissions, many plastics’ associated carbon emissions are on a similar scale to that of cardboard. Since cardboard is not waterproof and can be flimsy, a cardboard box rarely sees multiple uses. But a plastic box – sturdy, resistant to the elements, and cleanable – can last dozens to hundreds of times, eliminating the need for the dozens to hundreds of extra single-use cardboard boxes, giving the plastic box much lower carbon emissions.

Certainly, plastic litter does more damage in the environment than cardboard, which decays easily. However, if a plastic box were properly recycled when it dies, then litter doesn’t happen. The environmental dangers that plastic poses is mostly due to improper disposal at the end of its life, which is fixable, and becomes less likely when plastic becomes reusable. (Tell me, have you ever heard of throwing away a clean Lego brick?) If the litter problem is solved, the plastic box becomes the clear winner in sustainability.

I hope that, next time you look at a plastic nick-knack, you see neither a one-dimensional villain nor an unfettered miracle of modern science. The distinction of single-use plastic, and not plastic in general, as a litter culprit is key to solving our waste crisis. (Perhaps you already knew that before reading this post, in which case I hope you at least found my re-explanation a little bit entertaining.) While the people around you may insist on seeing the virtue of packaging materials in black and white, you now know that this is rarely the case. The reasons are simple, despite the convoluted arguments people will sometimes concoct to justify their absolute stance on plastic. After all, many of the plastics that we use everyday are clear. You can see right through.