Back in the 70s we could recycle paper and cardboard by taking it to a container behind the city municipal building. We weren't required to, but for a time when most of us got a daily newspaper it was a simple and obviously good idea.

There were places we could take glass and aluminum, mostly soda bottles and cans, and get paid for them by weight. Because we sorted them by type and color, they could pay us for them and still make money turning it back into raw materials.

But then they stopped making glass bottles and went to plastic. Then everything went to plastic, and we started noticing all the garbage piling up everywhere. The container manufacturers and soda companies didn't want us pointing the finger at them, so they funded an iconic ad campaign to convince people we were the problem.

But we still had all this plastic. So the oil companies convinced us we could recycle plastic. But no one had infrastructure to collect it, so they sold local governments on the idea of "mixed input stream" recycling. Just put it all in one bin and let the recycler (in China) sort it out.

We spent decades shipping our trash overseas, until China decided they didn't want our trash any more. We tried redirecting it to a few other countries, but no one wanted it, or could handle the volume.

Now that we were stuck with it, all the local infrastructure for collecting pre-sorted paper and glass and metal has gone away, and people have gotten used to putting all the "recyclables" in one bin, and we've never been good at separating what's actually recyclable, and plastic recycling has never been financially viable to begin with ... so most of our recycling gets shipped to the same landfills as the regular trash.

But hey, that's not a problem for the oil companies or container manufacturers to deal with. No, that's because consumers are lazy and don't care about the planet.