I’ve ranted in various places over the years but it’s 100% true in my city in Canada.

Decades ago we built a massive publicly-funded recycling system because the City could actually draw profit from the collection and sale of materials.

But about 15 years ago China stopped buying the waste, and it became a new shell-game of collecting the material but literally unable to do anything with it or sell it, so it any that gets does get sold mostly ends up in the down-stream recycling economy, where the bulk of it ends up being burned. The rest goes into the regular old landfill. Even waste cardboard has no value anymore.

People who separate recycling in our city now, are just pre-sorting it for the waste management company and keeping it out of their regular waste (profit) stream.

We do have our ewaste centers but knowing people that work there, I can say anecdotally I’ve been informed that the metal and rare metal waste is collected and sent for processing in Ontario, the rest of the bits (all the plastic which is 90% of eWaste) goes into the regular waste stream where it’s buried or burned, but never recycled.

Notice how Pepsi and Coke don’t use recycled plastic? If that doesn’t condemn the whole recycling “meme” as a sham, I don’t know what would.