I guess the major issue with 'plastics' is that they are wildly different. Polyethylene (PE, LDPE - plastic bags, HDPE - pipes], Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene

I guess the major issue with 'plastics' is that they are wildly different. Polyethylene (PE, LDPE - plastic bags, HDPE - pipes], Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene - ABS [Lego, cheap tools shell], and polycarbonate (PC plexiglass, quality tools] would be pretty much the same (just plastic) for most people. Yet, even sorting them is expensive, then the quality and degradation of the source material is unknown, so recycling them for new products is not very feasible.