This is a "motte and bailey" rhetorical trick they use.

The people against any kind of market regulation will argue that all recycling is inherently inefficient if the market doesn't do it spontaneously.

This is obviously undermined by the obvious success of many metal recycling schemes where the regulations created a market.

So they then flip from recycling to "plastic recycling". If you then point out the many plastic recyling successes they'll jump to specific plastics and ways of using plastics that make it harder to recycle them. The obvious solution of using further regulation to get people to update their processes to use the easily recyled plastics is mysteriously avoided even though it has literally been done for decades across the globe, sometimes led by corporate co-operation (e.g. milk in various countries is in semi-standardized containers).

If you have a gut reaction that recycling, or just plastic recycling is a bad thing, you've been conned by fossil fuel producers who compete with recycled plastic as a feedstock.