The problem is there's just not a good way to recycle most consumer-grade plastic: it emits more carbon to repurpose it than to just make new plastic. Glass has the same problem, though glass can at least be reused in a way most plastic can't. Honestly all non-metal recycling as done currently is just to make middle class people feel better.

However, I'm not sure why you stated it's for the middle class because I think it's to make all Americans feel like they're actually doing something good for the environment. Americans really like to do the easy thing and then pat themselves on the back for even doing that. Ask them to do the difficult things to alleviate the problems we generate with our conspicuous consumption and they fight tooth and nail for their god given right to continue buying the cheap plastic crap from China that they could really do without.

i.e., everybody in the US.

But, yeah: people will do all kinds of ridiculous things for a pat on the back, but will refuse the real issues like e.g. living more densely and using public transit.

Don't get me started on the size of the houses they feel they have to own and furnish. As the family size has gotten smaller and smaller over the decades, and as less and less people live with extended family, why on earth are the houses bigger and bigger?

What we really have a problem with in the US is that we have separated ourselves more and more from other people so we don't have to learn how to live with, ride with, share with people who are "strangers". Americans like to tout the concept of rugged individualism when in fact it's more like selfishness and shortsightedness.

The Interstate Highway Act made us the country we are today, for better and worse, mostly for worse.

Until we can live closer together we're just rearranging deck chairs.

finding recyclers.

Melbourne, Australia: A recycling plant went up in flames. Turned out it wasn't being recycled, it was just being stored. Waiting for a recycling option that made financial sense. An option that never came.

A lot of it was dangerous chemicals, not stored properly, and the place wasn't licensed to store them anyway.

Huge clouds covered the surroundings. Creeks polluted, people with respiratory problems.

As far as plastic bags go. Do people remember the days before plastics? Soft drinks in glass bottles, no such thing as bottled water, when shopping you either brought your own (non plastic) bags, or the shop put your shopping in brown paper bags.

Local councils here provide you with recycling bins. One for garden waste and food scraps (gets composted) and another for solids like cardboard, newspaper, hard plastics.
Soft plastics are supposed to go to local supermarkets into a special bin. Supposedly recycled into plastic furniture.
Can't help but wonder how much of the recycling bins' contents is actually recycled or repurposed, or just stored, or sent to landfill.

The World is slowly chocking on the 'convenience' of plastics.

Some plastics can be quite easily recycled. The problem is that it needs to be pretty "clean". And that's not just dirt and grease. It needs to be a single type of plastic. At a plastics factory I worked, we used recycled plastic as part of the production process. typically it was about 20%, with the balance being virgin material. That was mostly because the filters couldn't handle much more than that without clogging regularly. The exception was when we made those plastic trays that nurseries use to start small plants. We'd grind up just about anything and run it through in huge percentages. But predominately that was because the color requirements were nonexistent and imperfections were highly tolerable. But otherwise, the plastic has to be basically the EXACT color that the virgin material is. And clear plastic has incredibly high visual requirements that are created by the buyers.

Another part of the problem is that virgin material is cheap. That unfortunately means that there isn't much pressure on markets to use recycled plastic, nor is there much incentive to collect or generate "high quality" recycled content. This is one area where regulation could probably help by creating markets for both collecting and using high quality recycled material. A tax on virgin material would probably go a long way into making markets more interested in recycled "post consumer" content.

Plastics can recycle very well but we use them in a way that makes that impossible. At least with glass you can reuse the vessel itself.

And, for the most depressing aspect of it, as a mentor of mine once said: if they're turning the oil into plastic, they at least aren't burning it. We might be better off with petroleum as a source of plastic than as a source of energy.

It may not be exactly true today, but plastics originally were created because after oil was refined into fuels, there was material left over. Research was funded looking for uses for this by product. Plastics was one of the results. That might not be strictly true today, but it was always what I thought would happen if we started recycling programs. If there was enough of the material floating around then sooner or later someone would find a use for it. Unfortunately, to date, little of consequence has been found. I suspect that is because plastic is so cheap to begin with.

Thanks! About twenty years ago our extension office offered a course in Environmental Stewardship similar to the Master Gardener classes. I signed up for the inaugural course and was absolutely fascinated by it. Since they were feeling their way as to how to design this course and what content to include, we were sort of guinea pigs. What they deemed would be more useful than just lectures and readings was to take the small class (I believe there were only ten people who signed up) on various field trips. I learned so much from those. One of the field trips was to our county's recycling facility. I had been recycling since the 70's but had no idea where that stuff went after it left my little red bin, but the trip showed me just how big an operation it was. This was back in the day when very few people in my neighborhood recycled and you had instructions as to how to prepare your items for recycling. I remember all the removing of labels, washing of cans and flattening them, separating the colored comics sections from the newspaper, checking the plastic for the #1 or #2 on the bottom, etc.

As a side note, we also toured a state of the art sewage treatment plant and as unappetizing as that may sound, it was one of the trips that stuck with me for the rest of my life. The course only had two subsequent classes before the state pulled funding for it (under a R governor of course).