not in China, progress there is picking up pace, powered by solar. China is also prempting the loss of labour as people get older, and are building out fully robotic factories ,"dark factories" for the fact that the lights are turned off, not on, when they are running, as there are no humans on the floor. On the plastic's side China is by far the largest manufacurer of all things plastic, and buys load after load of US natural gas that gets pumped strait into cracking plants to be converted into polymers, but you can be sure that they, and others are working along sytematicaly to find a ploymer with the right properties for use, but that then iether breaks down comlpletly, or is inhearantly benign, and inert. My main point is that China, and nowhere else will decide how the whole plastic thing goes, and what we are loosing here in the west, is agency and credibility.

Asbestos and lead in petrol and CFCs were also progress. But we decided to progress further to reduce the chance of dying of cancer. And we did!

Asbestos is harmless if not inhaled, and the most dangerous forms of it were banned long ago. White asbestos (chrysotile) is relatively safe especially if used as an encapsulated filler. Here's an interesting study of chrysotile miners, exposed to very high levels of it daily: https://asbest-study.iarc.who.int/

The effects of CFCs are still disputed, but they replaced far more dangerous refrigerants... but somehow people are being convinced into using propane and butane again.

On the other hand, I'll say that leaded petrol was bad, but that's because it was designed to be dispersed into the atmosphere and the effects of lead poisoning quite clear.

This microplastics bullshit has not passed the test of time or (real) science. It's not "progress", it's become radical ideology. Here's something which may enlighten you: a ton of articles which claim to have discovered "microplastics" are really implying to have done so by detecting the decomposition products of long hydrocarbon chains, which are of course present in polymers like polyethylene, the world's most common plastic; but guess what else has long hydrocarbon chains? Fats and oils. As in biological matter.