There's an appealing hypothetical alternative where the plastic actually gets used. I had an opportunity a while back to work with a US company that gets paid

There's an appealing hypothetical alternative where the plastic actually gets used. I had an opportunity a while back to work with a US company that gets paid to accept bulk HDPE from bottle recycling on one end of the plant, shreds, extrudes, and machines it, and sells composite building materials out the other end. It's really quite cool to see the system working as designed, and a lot of trash becomes useful and valuable. However, there's a lot of situations where yeah, the landfill is a better destination... it's just not worth the effort to separate and clean some stuff. I wish we could come up with a technical mechanism (preferred) or regulatory system (acceptable) that would make it profitable to separate recyclable waste.