So, let's take Visy, in the context of this post, they are in the business of waste disposal, recycling, and packaging. For their packaging business, they turn raw materials into packaging. For cardboard, that's either dead trees or recycled/reprocessed cardboard.

So they either pay for brand new raw materials or recycled materials. They decide to skip the middle man and setup a plant, negotiate contracts with councils/governments and take peoples waste so they can turn it into packaging.

That's what recycling is. It's not magic. If there is no one/business on the other end to consume or process it, it's not recycling, it just garbage and goes to a land fill.

I'm just using cardboard as an example because it's easier to grok (trees/cardboard etc), but over the last 5 years there has literally been occasions where the price of brand new cardboard has been lower than recycled cardboard. So yes, sometimes this the recycling industry is all sorts of fucked, but if you don't have industry/business/consumer on the other end of this recycling equation it's worthless.