Single-stream recycling was basically a greenwashing scam enabled by the ability of supply chains to hide where the product ends up. The plastics weren't being

Single-stream recycling was basically a greenwashing scam enabled by the ability of supply chains to hide where the product ends up. The plastics weren't being recycled; they were being shipped to China, where peasant children would sift through them for anything of value and the rest would be left in the fields. I'd recommend the documentary "Plastic China" for an expose on that; it's the reason that the Chinese government has banned new garbage imports: https://www.cnex.tw/plasticchina https://www.cnex.tw/plasticchina I highly suspect that recycling is in fact a terrible economic idea, and it's not at all cost effective to have people sort their garbage so it can be recovered for materials worth pennies anyway. The problem is that you cannot generally tell civilized affluent consumers that their consumption habits are going to turn this planet into the world of Wall-E, without them insisting we do something about this. The real product being sold was the myth of a sustainable future, just as it is with most other industries.