It's not that recycling plastic is 100% a "sham". Recycled plastic is real, and products made from recycled plastic are real. The "sham" is that recycling plastic is not efficient. Still marginally better than straight into a landfill.
Firstly, there are too many plastics mixed together (and the article touches on that).
There is also the issue that even if you have waste that is made exactly of one kind of plastic, and it's the right one for some application, recycling works by chopping plastic into pieces. This chopping shortens the long-chain molecules that give the plastic some of its important qualities like impact strength. The resulting plastic is inferior to the original, even if pure and homogeneous.
If 85% of the plastic I deliver into my county's recycling program ends up in a landfill, I would consider that basically a sham.
If 15% of that plastic ends up in a landfill, that's not a sham (though there should be some openness about what is really going on).
I’d hate for this movement to push people to simply skip the recycling step.
The narrative that recycling plastics is never effective isn’t accurate and drives demand for more plastic manufacturing as stocks of recyclable plastics diminish.
Huh, wonder who started this rumor anyway?