If there were ways to save large amounts while maintaining economic output, people would be doing them and making massive amounts of money from the savings.
There are ways to achieve a mean world GDP, or at least a standard of living similar to ours at a much lower rate of single-use resource consumption, but we're at a local optima. Civilization is a greedy search algorithm.
It's a matter of price. Labour ist very expensive and high taxed. Therefore you can get rich by developing technology saving labour. On the other hand energy is cheap, so there is no economical incentive to save energy. Image an opposite pricing. I bet we would have carbon cars weighing 300 kg and with 1l/km fuel consumption. Technologically possible today but not economically.
There are ways to achieve a mean world GDP, or at least a standard of living similar to ours at a much lower rate of single-use resource consumption, but we're at a local optima. Civilization is a greedy search algorithm.