Fascinating that the article most cited by the "recycling is a con by silly hippies, just use disposable plastic and landfill it" crowd as well as this "recycling is a con by evil big business, just stop buying stuff" article are both from the New York Times.

I personally am part of the "we should charge corporations who generate the refuse for disposal, clean up and recycling as well as carbon in production, and let the market and human ingenuity then sort it out via a whole range of specific interventions that match the needs of each sector" team.

That solution will almost certainly involve a whole bunch of recycling, plus other things like making things easier to recycle, using more recycled material, but apparently both the hippies and the libertarians think recycling is a scam for entirely opposite reasons and so it's hard to have a nuanced cost-based discussion about this, at least in the US.

In Europe they generally track the stats on how much is being recycled and continuously aim to improve that, tweaking things as they go.