> Recycling just increases the chance that it's going to end up as low-quality plastic polluting the environment.

I don't follow your logic. Say you consume 10 units of plastic per year; if 5 of them are still good to be recycled, and 5 end up in the landfill as degraded "low-quality plastic" (whatever that means), you net landfill contribution is 5/yr.

Why would be sending 10 units/yr of "high-quality plastic" be any better?

In practice, the issue is economic; it's cheaper to produce new plastic than to fix the entire recycling supply-chain.

Until we have a carbon tax over plastic manufacturers that equalizes the recycling costs, it'll be hard to create systemic change just based on consumers' consciousness.