I was dragged to a recycling plant with a bunch of curious engineers from Google a long time ago. The takeaway was that is was a giant scam- we can't recycle glass, paper is iffy, msot of the stuff is meh, but aluminum is ok. Trash trucks literally pulled up to the plant and removed the "unrecycleable" waste.
We were all so pissed we went into software, when one could literally just put trash into a different container with a green/blue color, and thus purify and bless it, and then send it to a dump.
The part we missed was the ships just taking all this trash to China and Bangladesh.
Just because plastic is a scam doesn't necessarily mean everything else recycled is. Scrap metal is big business. Old rubber tires get shredded and vulcanized into new products.
It’s also not really saving any energy or valuable resources, and glass is heavy and fragile.
(Which of course uses fossil fuels for the bitumen; possibly even more than the equivalent mass of Portland cement concrete.)
I'm not aware of any other significant uses for recycled glass.
The only caveat is colored glass can only really be used to make the same color glass (at least economically).
Metals, Glass and paper are profitable to be recycled, plastic a bit less so, but still doable.
But in EU there are a lot of programs to cut taxes or subsidize recycling so maybe that’s actually working?
If this one was 'safe' until it wasn't, why do you think a newer kind of plastic is going to be safe? Plus now you have bought twice as many containers.
Narrator: they weren't
They had to do a big mea culpa and then scramble to change their product line later in the game than they could have.
And then there was an organic food company (Muir) that dragged their feet on switching the liners for their canned tomatoes and sauces (you may recall that acids make the leaching worse) and pissed a lot of people right off.
Whitney Webb is arguably the premier investigative journalists of our age. Any publication that doesn't source her work is simply not credible.
https://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/category/whitney-web...
I get it, plastic can't be recycled profitably and we should be using way less. But one of the reasons its so terrible to recycle is because of how poorly it's sorted.
How much time or money does it cost to not put plastic bottles in the paper bin? How much are you going to earn in that time to donate?