recycling is last on the list of reduce, reuse, recycle. also recycling plastic often just isn’t effective. the better approach is to make things out of inoffensive materials into products that you can reuse.

first of all you need to sort plastics properly (and there are dozens of types you’ll commonly encounter), and then you need to make sure to sort out all the plastics that are bonded or laminated to anything else. you can’t really separate those kinds of plastics from their partner materials properly on an industrial scale, as in there’s like one factory that can properly recycle tetrapaks into recycled material in the world for example. every other waste management facility either incinerates the plastic or adds them to a landfill. recycled plastic is in the single digit % of all plastic products.

due to the expensive recycling process it’s almost always cheaper to use fresh new plastic instead of recycled material. not to mention that when recycled plastic is contaminated with different plastics eventually its usability as a material decreases.