An entire generation of people was told in the 1990s that recycling was morally virtuous and that “doing their part,” however small, could clean up the environment. And they believed it because it was easy. “Oh, I can order this meal kit service and be environmentally friendly because it’s all organic and all that plastic packaging can be recycled? Great!”

Much of the messaging was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", people weren't just told that recycling was magic.

I'm sure the 3 R's being frequently overlaid on the recycling logo didn't particularly help the cause of the first two.

People weren’t told that they were supposed to prioritize those three things in that order. First reduce consumption, and then reuse the things you do use, and then recycle the things you can no longer use.

Most people think recycling is as good as never having consumed in the first place.

It would be fine to collect plastic bags, as well as other plastic types, if recyclers could use plasma gasifiers ("burns" hotter, cleaner than incineration) on site to generate power (via syngas, waste to energy) instead of waiting for a buyer to arrive that never will. The slag would be used for roads mixed into asphalt aggregate (similar to how colored glass is used for construction aggregate).

Not everything collected through recycling must be "recycled" in the traditional sense. It should be called "landfill diversion", not recycling.

> It is amazing how much infrastructure and technology is in place for a process that is proving incompatible with reality (both in terms of capability of the tech, and economics of the commodities).

Is it incompatible? The article makes it sounds like a clear win for the city, and a sometimes-win for the plant:

All of this may mean that at any given moment, recycling can be anything from highly profitable to a struggle to cover costs. If we were to shut these facilities down during periods where they weren't profitable, however, we'd be wasting infrastructure and expertise we'd want when costs shift in the other direction.

The city does pay a tipping fee to get rid of the materials, but it's less than what it would pay to landfill them—plus it avoids the cost of transporting everything to the landfill.

The city even has a chance to get some of its tipping fee back. When recycled materials are sufficiently valuable, Sims shares a percentage of the profits back with the government. During periods where these materials are priced low, the company gets to keep any profits it can eke out.

The net result is that the city can benefit when recycled materials are valuable. And when raw material prices are low, it's still profitable to keep the facility operating.

New York City is a massive outlier when it comes to waste disposal. They have no working landfill sites or incineration facilities, they have considerable political difficulties in exporting waste to New Jersey or New York State and their waste management system is still substantially dysfunctional due to the legacy of organised crime. As a result, they have the highest per-tonne landfill costs in North America. These problems could be fixed on a practical level with a handful of modern waste-to-energy plants, but that's politically untenable in the current climate.

I wish Supercritical Water Oxidation had worked out.

But it requires ceramics that are resistant to heat, pressure, and chemical erosion, which turns out to be the usual 'pick two' situation.

I had heard someone was working on composite ceramics to deal with this (heat and pressure resistant bulk, enameled with heat and chemical resistant coatings) but have heard nothing since.

So far they only seem to be price competitive in hazardous waste situations.

The article was written in 2015 when commodity prices were high, I doubt that the city mentioned in the article is seeing the same results today. I'd encourage you to read up on China's import ban and how that has effectively upended the US recycling system.

Method famously split from the status quo for a while, years ago, and produced non-recyclable containers for some of their products. Their position was that if recycling only nets you 30% of the inputs back, you are better off using virgin materials to make a container that takes 30% of the material of the recyclable version, because you reduce the footprint of shipping, and the pollution of recycling.

I believe Danon yogurt made a similar decision when they went to thinner plastic on their single serving cups.

I think Method has since figured out a recyclable solution so their refill bags are recyclable but still made of next to nothing.

Reduction is the best thing that could potentially happen right now, but it's also going to require a cultural sea change on par with the adoption of recycling -- and there are many, many interests aligned against reducing consumption.

In the meantime, recycling technology is still in relative infancy, so while it may not make business sense now, it may be essential in the future for the recovery of certain materials. And, like solar before it, the only way to get it to a useful enough efficiency for that future use is to suffer through adopting it while it's inefficient.

Can the same be said about plastic straws? Maybe another one of those "let's all feel good about how much we're saving the world" efforts with quantitatively insignificant impact?

It's why "reduce" and "reuse" come before "recycling" in the full slogan. That's not compatible with the capitalist drive to upgrade and dispose of consumer electronics once every year or two, to say nothing of the packaging waste involved in many foods.