I have always thought that recycling is a waste of time, since consumer society is so vast, what is the point? Wouldn’t it be better to have less consumption and goods that lasted? A change of life styles, for the better? Of course not, materialism and the quest for affluence and comfort, this age of affluence, the great utopian dream of modernity, is accepted by almost everybody! Recycling makes the consumers feel good about themselves. And, as detailed below, at least in the US, much of the recycling is done by shipping rubbish to China. How is that ecologically sane? One would have thought that this would make more sense done locally, but no, it is globalism, all the way down.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html