My beef is specifically with plastics recycling. Aluminum/steel recycling is, for example, a very real thing.
The issue with "plastics recycling" is that it mostly doesn't exist. The plastics industry wants people to think it exists so that they don't realize the only real solution to plastic waste is to ban single-use plastics.
> If the companies ship stuff abroad and that's bad then ban it. Like the EU has done.
> Regulation on waste shipments entered into force on 20 May 2024.
First of all, as that page says, they didn't ban it, they implemented new regulations on it. And the impetus for those new regulations was, as I said above, the realization that foreign "recyclers" are not recycling, they are dumping/burning/etc.
Unfortunately, those new regulations will probably make no difference, because guess what? The EU is allowing the exporters themselves to commission their own audits.
Now, they could have banned exports entirely, but they didn't. And the reason they didn't is because they can't do it domestically. And they can't do it domestically because the technology to recycle them at industrial scale doesn't exist.. The entire concept is built on fraud.
There is only one type of plastic that can be recycled closed-loop at industrial scale: PET. Literally every other plastic mathematically is guaranteed to create waste. Even other plastics deemed "highly recyclable" at best require 80-90% virgin feedstock, and so the total possible amount you can recycle is only 10-20% of what is produced.
There are multiple solutions to "plastics recycling" and all of the answer are "do something else", e.g.: switch to a different material, incinerate, sequester in a landfill, ban their use, etc.