This is a claim that's often repeated ad nauseum: plastic recycling doesn't work and it's a sham.
There's an element of truth to it: plastics recycling in the USA today is, in aggregate, in a sorry state.
But it's become "common knowledge" that there's no way to make it better. That's not true.
Turn, for example, to British Columbia, which passed an Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) law several years ago, which created a system to stabilize the prices of recycled plastics so that recyclers could raise money to build the facilities to process the material.
Now they have the most sophisticated sortation and recycling centers in North America. Laser-based systems identify plastic types and use shots of compressed air to automatically direct plastic onto the proper conveyor.
Each stream is shredded and ground, and then hot washed and dried. Then it's sorted again, this time for color, by computer vision and more compressed air to create streams of clear material and streams of green or other colors.
The result is that 56% of rigid plastic packaging in BC is recycled. That's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and definitely not a "sham".
The problem we have in America is that, broadly, we need public-private partnerships to invest in the sort of equipment that can do this. The technology exists, it works, and it's already being used. Virgin plastic should be taxed and then that tax should subsidize and stabilize the price of recycled material so that private capital can supply the equipment financing. And regional authorities should organize recycling so that enough material can go through one facility to amortize the $30m in equipment over the poundage. (These contracts can be bid at auction to keep them fair.)
In other words, this is not an area where a pure free market works, and it typically requires coordination across regional population centers of 7m+ to get enough poundage through the system.
If we can do what BC did, the rewards are big: plastic is, by far, a lower emitter of GHG than paper-based packaging, does a better job reducing food shrink than any other material, and offers massive weight savings (and GHG savings) versus glass.
Today, of course, it's become much more en vogue to pursue high GHG packaging solutions ("because everyone knows plastic is bad!") rather than build public pressure to adopt the political steps required to implement already proven production technology.