Recycling is a distraction. Always has been. It's a marketing and regulatory capture ploy by the plastics industry to avoid any responsibility for their colossal waste.

Sure, recycling before a tiny bit, in the margin, maybe, but imagine where we'd be if all the money and effort that went into recycling instead went into materials engineering to create biodegradable alternatives to one-tube-user plastics?

In fact, getting rid of recycling globally might actually help since it would highlight to people how much they're putting into the landfill. That might actually spark some political will to regulate plastics better, instead of just high-optics items like plastic bags and straws.