Obviously part of the solution is going to necessarily require companies stop putting so much waste packaging on products.
Why not more of both?
I let my nephews tear down broken old laptops for parts reuse, for example ... quite fun and useful.
And since I am in germany, I can also add more to the recycling part. We sort old glas by colors - they do get recycled. Old paper - same.
And even plastic to some extent, even though I know that most of that gets burned. But some of it actually does get recycled.
Our ordinary trash bin is quite small.
Avoid producing waste, reuse, recycle, incinerate it, final disposal (or reuse in concrete etc): that's the chain to follow, and each part is important.
There is almost no focus on reuse in the US. If you want to get groceries, you don't take a container to fill, you buy your food wastefully prepackaged. Fast food restaurants don't give you a plate and glass, they give you disposable wrapping and a plastic cup. Even clothes are meant to be disposable - most people don't repair their shoes, they just throw them out and buy new ones.
I don't see this mentality changing any time soon, and it's really sad. We should start changing companies for the disposal costs of their products and packaging, rather than hiding the cost in environmental damage.
The supermarket sold some sturdier and bigger bags for like 50 cents, who can be reused for years and they even replace it for you if the bag is ruined for some reason, but using this was socially frowned upon. After the tax, it is socially acceptable to reuse bags now.
It is possible to change this on a society level, and the change can be vary fast on our current hyper-connected economy.
A similar thing happened with lunches. Before 2008, people would never carried their own lunches from home, it was a total social faux-pa. The mix of economic downturn (even if the same people did not feel it), healthy lifestyles are trendy and the classic one-upmanship between who would bring the fanciest lunch lead to droves of people carrying their lunches on public transit almost overnight, special stores that sell thermos and special bags, and hundreds of cook books.
Background: I would like to start or buy a recycling business because I want to be part of the solution instead of the problem (and if it can make a profit, I'm not independently wealthy). Yes, I know we need to reduce and reuse first, but we're now also sitting in a mountain of plastic and given inertia, it's not going to go away anytime soon.
I did read this one already [1], which I recommend to get a basic understanding of the various forms of recycling and the profitability.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1569906769/ref=ppx_yo_dt...