> happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India

It's not like they like this outcome or are even aware of it. We can't blame the individuals who want to do things properly here.

The correct solution to "broken recycling chain" is not "let's not recycle", it's "let's fix the recycling chain".

The issue with non-reusable / non-recyclable stuff is that we have a limited amount of it and is also environmentally expensive.

Even recycling is not ideal. There's waste, and it costs energy. It's in the end not so sustainable.

The best solution to me is reusable bags and containers (washable, and possibly refundable / returnable) whenever possible.

The issue with recycling, as-practiced, is that there's no lifecycle accounting (in many countries, including most of the US).

If we boosted plastic price at point of sale by a recoverable amount, claimable when returning the container for recycling, we'd get higher participation.

Separately, we should also apply the same to the post-return lifecycle: company pays a premium for the material flow, then it rebated that premium upon proof of recycling.

if energy is a problem then surely we'd just build global recycling plants at geothermal hotspots? it's not like shipping is a problem. the sense I get is that the main bottleneck with recycling isn't energy, but labour. handling and sorting rubbish properly is tedious and unpleasant and the west doesn't want to spend the money that its workers would expect for it

tangentially--and I'm aware this sounds incredibly stupid, and I'm sure it is--but on the topic of geothermal hotspots, what is the downside of finding some lava/magma source deep, deep underground and just dumping rubbish in there? surely most of the fumes would just be absorbed before they reach the surface? is it just too expensive of an idea/has it been done/is it likely to have undesirable long term side-effects/do we simply not have safe access to such things