I am the author of the piece.

I've been a writer and editor for more than a decade, though I'm pretty new to FEE. Our organization is reputable; we've been around since the 1940s after being launched by Henry Hazlitt and Leonard Read. (You can read about us on Wiki here: https://bit.ly/2tCS4tY.)

Like any publication, we have our views (economics, free markets, and liberty) but we have an immaculate rating from Newsguard. This particular used sound sources--the New York Times, a Columbia Unv. study, and Popular Mechanics. It was also shared by multiple high profile economists. I think if you read the piece carefully, you'll see there is both an economic and environmental concern regarding mandatory recycling. Recycling makes sense in some cases, but not in others. It's also expensive and environmentally harmful in some cases--which is why hundreds of US cities are giving up on it (per the NYT). Happy to discuss the topic.

Yes. They do not like needing to make things recyclable because it takes effort by corporations and the rich and powerful. The populace does not like the concept of waste and recycling was the panacea.

However, the political slant is that trashing these goods is more than enough. They definitely do not like the idea of "reduce or reuse". This would mean making durable goods, which costs more. Disposable goods make the most profit for the corporation while large amounts of trash must be handled by the public. Privatizing profits and socializing losses is the slant.

It is Koch bros funded, so make of that what you will.

Since it's from a group with a known idealogical basis, it's not going to be an open minded discussion. But the next question is why wouldn't they like recycling? They seem to make a lot of manufactured chemical and plastic products, do they want you to not recycle because they sell you less new plastics?

It does seems like round 1 of us recycling in the 21st century is going to need big changes so we can get a scheme that will actually work for recycling.

I have no particular basis for saying this, but it feels like it was written as part of a larger attempt to discredit the environmental movement as a while.

The FEE is a libertarian think-tank, and quite comfortably to the right.

There aren't any unbiased websites, with a possible exception for the purely algorithmic. It's like a fish accusing another fish of being more wet. "Unbiased" generally means "having less clearly defined bias".