If we were serious about recycling plastic, we would enact policies to mandate industrial infrastructures that mimic natural ecosystems, where the waste products of one enterprise must become the raw materials of another. The visionary architect William McDonough has a book on this subject entitled “Cradle to Cradle” that is well worth reading.
Unfortunately, corporations have a vested interest in maximizing profits and minimizing costs, so they simply “externalize” the cost of doing business onto the public and the natural environment, and they have bought out policymakers to maintain this toxic status quo. This is why our industrial consumer society has become the terminal Cancer of the Earth, and cancer has only 2 possible outcomes: death or spontaneous remission.