Seems incredibly implausible.
In this process lots gets washed away, the local water is no longer drinkable (so they have to buy water to drink from trucks that do the rounds).
Any guesses where the river leads to?
The ocean.
Also many plastics are hard to identify. So you were having kids with lighters burn a bit of that microwave tray (in black) to sniff it and then guess what the rest of the tray was made of. Then it would be put in one of the twenty or so piles of different types of plastic.
The Chinese President saw the film about all of this banned the imports and banned the film. That is how we got here.
The bit you didn't see (because the film was band) is how water intensive the process is. The leftover food on the microwaved tray does not clean itself. When it has been sliced up into lots of small pieces, washed and compressed into some block of recyclable stuff you get bits of it washed away to end up eventually in the ocean, even if it blights local fields first before the rains come.
The current situation is that they stopped doing that because it's not economic anymore (and some "green backlash").
If they were just being payed to buy plastic and dump it in the rivers there would be no problem in continuing to do that.
Id happily wager net payments are huge and going in the other direction.
That is completely wrong, you'll need to provide evidence here, it's strange so many replies say the same.
China pays for their recycling imports and get a good deal on shipping. Current tariff wars have changed this environment and now they won't take it.
California alone earns billions selling waste to them
> In 2016, California’s exports of recyclables amounted to 15 million tons, worth an estimated $4.6 billion. Some 62 percent of that exported material went to China in 2016
https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2018/01/24/china-fal...
You pay recycling companies to process waste, and the cost of doing so locally in the U.S. now after the Chinese ban is so high that it means cities cannot afford it, thus waste that would have been sent to China for recycling is now piling in landfills or being burnt.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china...
But on statistics everything is fine for some.
Seriously, it's easy to be misinformed on this topic, mostly because the truth is hidden and because people make all sorts of claims without any evidence.
Enough with the FUD
For 30+ years "they" were basically slowly killing us. Whether they knew it or not.
In this case - with "recycling" - they likely knew what was really going on - but because money - they sold us a bill of goods; though we happily went along with it, too.
I don't think there's any way out of this mess.
Why in all this time haven’t some alternatives to non-biodegradable plastic emerged?
I'd suggest taking your analysis a step further.
The whole electric powertrain was primitive.
The motor speed controller was essentially a giant multi-tap resistor (such a motor controller is still used for most automobile HVAC blower speed control, because it is cheap to manufacture - though PWM systems are becoming more common in newer vehicles).
Electric motors were brushed series or shunt wound devices (not permanent magnet, not brushless, not multi-phased). Today's electric cars are virtually all 3-phase systems with a controller that converts from DC to 3-phase AC, with appropriate brushless motors.
Major power losses all along the way, coupled with poor battery technology. It is honestly amazing that they were able to get any workable range at all in the vehicles that were manufactured.