It's completely baffeling that a cheap "cardboard spool" is a pro and better "plastic spool" is a con.
First: cardboard holds moisture and degrades in shipping, meaning your brand new vacuum-sealed filament can arrive wet and dusty.
Second: it's just outright nuts to me that somebody buying materials for an inefficient and highly wasteful plastic manufacturing process would be morally opposed to using plastic or creating plastic waste. These things aren't even bulk packaged. To 3D print, you need to buy piles of individual rolls, each with its own vacuum bag and packet of silica gel, put into a roll sized box, that's put into a bigger box before being shipped halfway around the world to your doorstep.
There's nothing "green" about 3D printing, and there never will be. Any attempt to convince you otherwise is a brazen marketing gimmick spoken from the mouth of a salesman. It's a hustle. They may as well be a used car dealer trying to sell you the benefits of organic, locally-sourced, farm-to-table gasoline.
If you're not comfortable with waste or throwing away plastic, then maybe learn how to whittle instead?
Glass-half-empty kinda guy right there.
I really love the logic of "we can't reduce the impact on the environment to zero, so we should just not care at all." It's like saying "the catalyst in the car doesn't reduce the emissions to zero, so we should just remove it and all filters." While yes, a gas car will never emit fresh air, we should still try to reduce emissions as far as possible, or else we'd have many more problems much faster. Unless you love breathing in the thick black smoke.
PLA is a bioplastic. It's created from plants, that consume CO2. When you either compost or burn PLA, you're only putting back the CO2 to the atmosphere the plants took out of it. The same goes for cardboard, and many manufacturers even use recycled cardboard. Other plastics, such as those the spools are made from, are made from fossil materials that used to be underground as oil. We pump that to the surface, turn it into plastic and burn it, now we've added CO2 to the atmosphere that wasn't there before.
By the way, cardboard spools are usually more expensive to manufacture than plastic spools. But where I live, cardboard is cheaper to dispose of than the kind of plastic spools are made from. I haven't had any issue with cardboard spools so far, no damaged spool, no wet filament. The only time a print failed because a spool got stuck was on a plastic spool.
3D-Printing will always use up some resources, but there is still a large difference between using fossile vs. renewable ressources. And even if we can't reduce the amount of fossile ressources to zero, we can still try to reduce them as much as we can instead of trying to burn limited ressources as fast as we can.
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