Capitalism is just an idea. The actually existing system is a complex self-contradicting hydra that is hard to describe. But yes as another commenter said it comes down to governance. How do we as people want to govern human action? I am way more in favor of decentralized governance. I’d say that a lot of our problems come from having a powerful centralized government that can be influenced by the wealthy. That’s not “capitalism” in a libertarian sense at all. It’s more like an oligarchy in practice. Tho many tend to refer to our system as capitalism, which can lead us down all manner of arguments over terminology. What I really care about is power and how it is distributed. I believe in more directly democratic systems. I think oligarchy tends to lead to problems like plastic waste because the wealthy rulers can basically insulate themselves from any problems they cause, while the rest of us have the choice of buying plastic trash or spending more resources to avoid plastic. The third option of zero waste grocery stores (food as one example) could lead to a life without extra burden on the more conscious consumers and without excess plastic trash. These are common in some other countries, but a country flooded by the plastic producers’ public relations machine, US consumers are all to happy to buy more and more plastic trash. A big question on my mind lately is why we allow public relations to manipulate us in to believing these falsehoods. We’ve surrounded ourselves with megaphones of corporate endorsed pseudoscience, as happened with disposable plastics. Sociologists know public relations works, but we’ve allowed the public relations industry to convince us it’s benign. I think we need to think hard about who that industry serves.

By the way, Noam Chomsky uses the phrase “really existing capitalism today” to talk about the system we’ve ended up with.

https://youtu.be/_uuYjUxf6Uk