I highly recommend watching:
PENN & TELLER: BULLSHIT, RECYCLING

Part of the issue with recycling is that the government is locked into one mode of thinking. Glass containers must be recycled into glass containers. When this doesn’t work, then the glass is landfilled rather than used in place of gravel in asphalt and concrete.

Theoretically plastic shopping bags can be recycled into more shopping bags if the originals are clean enough. If.

Plastic shopping bags can be processed into a lumber substitute which works very well. Another interesting use for plastic shopping bags is asphalt. The bags are slit into long strips and mixed into asphalt. The bags improve the durability of asphalt roadways.

Well put, though your first sentence reminded me of that Mad Men episode in which the Draper family picnicked in the park and, at the end, just shook the blanket into the grass with all garbage untended.

Presumably they assumed some park worker would come by with a stick eventually, or perhaps there were no receptacles then. The 60s is a bit before my time. By the 70s and 80s we had garbage cans in the parks in Toronto. Or maybe they just didn’t care.

Many people at the time of the episode suggested that’s how it actually was in those times, prior to the anti-littering campaigns of the late 60s and early 70s.

I remember thinking, wow, there’s a PR-facilitated social transformation I could get behind. When I was a kid in the 70s I was also fascinated by the lingering practice of throwing garbage out of a moving car into the ditch at the side of the highway.

I’m not exactly a champion of green causes, but I can’t get into the headspace of piggishly [metaphor, no insult to pig hygiene] tossing one’s crap everywhere and moving on. Maybe if I were an outdoorsman, I’d have trouble with the necessity of carting out actual human waste from some environments, but other than that I’m down with tidiness.

Although, it does occur to me that this sort of concern is largely an artifact of the age of packaged goods, relatively new still in the 60s. If your picnic had consisted entirely of home cooked foods, fruits, and similar organic matter served on non disposable dining ware, as once was the case, then I guess leaving a little organic waste around might still seem gross to us now but is at least biodegradable and in the long human tradition.

All in all, I’m pleased to have at least one example of social change orchestrated by government and non-profit entities and the media that I can support.

Commercial hog farms would totally fail the same tests, and probably commercial sized chicken and turkey operations. A favorite comment from that era was that a commercial hog operation announced that they had cut odor emissions in half. What formerly smelled like 60,000 hogs now only smelled like 30,000.

Here in eastern Massachusetts, I am told that haulers charge a municipality less to dispose of single stream recycling than to dispose of garbage. So recycling passes, if not a profit test, then at least a cost test. Although it is conceivable that this is due to some other market distortion somewhere.

All this nonsense would be moot if we had working plasma gasification of garbage, but I haven’t heard much about that since back in 2012. InEnTec, the outfit featured in that link hasn’t had a press release since 2017. Hopefully someone else has picked up the, er, flame.