There’s been a few scandals where waste planned for recycling just gets shipped to the third world countries and dumped.

But also, recycling is a scam because its been pushed onto the consumer by industry where industry should be dealing with the full life cycle of their product design choices.

Industry bribeslobbies federal government against regulations that would require them to either make better material choices in design or clean up their mess. Instead they push for policies that require the consumer to foot the bill and local government to attempt to clean up the mess.

Consumers aren’t in a position to bribelobby federal government. Local government isn’t equipped to clean up the mess properly so they ultimately rely on industry who gets to charge the local government to clean up the mess created by industry and then only pretend to clean it up rather than actually clean it up.