The Western wolds is comitting massive fraud and has you fooled too.

In UK recyclers get paid by the government a small amount per ton recycled. It is , however, not enough to trully recycle anything. So they take out a few valuable plastics, and pay randpm company in poor country to tale this plastic, and to sign paperwork saying that it's going to a recycling facility. In reality it will simply be dumped, and money will be pocketed.

Then when someone complains, they pull the documents thst were signed by some random fall guy, make a surprised face, and claim they thought the plastic would be recycled.

Where does it end then ? Burned in the air ? I don't know if it is worse or better, I have no data about it. But I suppose it's neither neutral.

Recycling plastic is very hard as a single product is often a combinaison of different kind of 'plastics', which happen to be a generic name for different materials, and which impose different kind of treatment for each of them. Colored plastics add up to the issue as you can't recycle different colored plastic of the same kind together...

For example, a single coca-cola bottle is typically made of 3 kind of plastics : the bottle itself (transparent), the cap(red with white or black scripting), and the wrapping around of the bottle (made of 2 or 3 different colors).

And that's nothing compared to toothpaste tubes, which was taken as an example in a recent 'Der Spiegel' issue to illustrate the ecologic nightmare plastics represent. And let's not forget ketchup plastic bottles, which is also some kind of marvel of assembled plastic enginering.

Plastic recycling is currently more a matter of vertue signaling than a reality as only 1 to 5 percent of plastic (I don't know the exact numbers) is curently recycled worldwide.

In western world (or at least in europe), most of them are incinerated in electricity thermal generators or buried in waste dumps.

Until recently, american waste (plastics) were send to China to be buried or burned, until the chinese government made it illegal.

The real indicator should be some kind of a 'plastic consumption index' by countries and/or companies and/or household, used to monitor the amount we produce it, use it and get rid of the waste.