That misses an important point: Recycling as a "solution" was easy to fund for "awareness" programs and other forms of essentially propaganda, because corps cou

That misses an important point: Recycling as a "solution" was easy to fund for "awareness" programs and other forms of essentially propaganda, because corps could easily see the ROI for reducing a potential cost, so there was ample money (read: force, power, or simply human resources) to tell people that "this is the way". Who could possibly have comparably the same level of funding for a "hey this isn't doing what they say it's doing" awareness campaign? That took like twenty years to organize. That's the central problem of any capitalist system; It by definition produces ready made organization of resources towards whatever a capital class wants, while making it inherently harder for the non-capital class to similarly put their technically significant resources towards their own goals. Capitalism inherently puts more control over large amounts of resources in the hands of those that prioritize individual rewards and have strong individual incentives against collective improvement. It inherently pressures the Capital class to be against collective improvement that has any cost on them, even extremely vague or distant costs, or hell, even just "costs" that are actually just personal subjective preferences, because they can afford that.