Around 2015 China stopped buying much of the worlds' plastic refuse which caused most municipal waste recycling programs in America to shut down. Since then it's sort of just been thrown away because plastic is really hard to recycle into something equally useful, in a way that does not just add more pollution. Even LEGO won't use recycled plastic.

The solution is to move away as much as possible from disposable, and most forms of consumer and retail plastic. It has invaluable uses, but there is simply too much and it's polluting faster than we can clean it.