A community around recycling reminds me of the article "We wash our trash to repent for killing God". Like some commenters in this discussion I believe plastic recycling is a distraction at best.
And how is it useful or respectful to be judgemental about what other people engage in and form communities around? Is being a Football fan, an archer, a woodworker or whatever in your spare time somehow more valuable or more useful than engaging with recycling, upcycling, tinkering with machines, doing community work and all the other activities that go into a project like PP?
But the topic and difference of this thread is that football fans don't ask you to feed and house them for over a decade, while they do performative art (all while owning 10, unmentioned, hectares of land but claiming homelessness and poverty).
Even if you take the stance that PP is art - artists have asked for money for as long as there has been art. Doesn't seem unusual to me.
Are you referring to the land in Portugal that they also made available to the public and that they made a lot of YouTube videos and other documentation about? I would hardly call that "unmentioned".
None of them has the faux moral aspect of plastic recycling that almost sees disposable plastic use as sinning. None of them has forced paper straws on me.
And if you really insist on continuing with the metaphor: Whenever I lived in certain big cities, the situations before and after football matches most definitely had a more drastic impact on daily life than a slightly soggy straw.
When churches had significant power and shaped the discourse and culture for the worse (I am not so sure if it's worse anymore), I definitely was quite annoyed at them.
But this organisation has inarguably done good in the world. There's no need to detract from that.