Recycling keeps us from digging more holes to dump our waste. It has a cost. In Washington there are no more land to dig holes and a spot in NE Oregon is the dumping ground for Seattle. A newspaper report (years ago) said that 100 boxcars loaded with trash went to Oregon 6 days a week. A new transfer station was built in S. Seattle and it as as large as a cathedral (and a lot more useful).

Recycling should be considered a production cost. Product life cycle needs to be considered.
The recovery/recycling cost shoudl be added to the cost of manufacture.

When I first visited Hungary in the early eighties, there was little plastic. Everything came in glass bottles or sat bare, such as bread, on the shelves. Recycling kiosks occupied corners of apartment complexes in the towns and cities and there was no visible litter on the streets. So we have living proof that we can do without most plastics.
Those plastics that we have dumped on the earth can be collected and used to pave roads and as agregate in concretes. Although it turns out most plastics do not recycle well as their former constituents, new and broader applications can be found if energy and thought ( read money ) are applied to solutions. As of yet, this has not been done on a broad scale.

I'm in favor of recycling. Our planet has a limited amount of resources and conceivably we could run out sometime in the future. Also we have mountains of trash. If we don't recycle we could be buried in trash in the future.

It takes only 3% of the energy needed to make a bottle out of old bottles then it does out of new material. It takes only 2% of the energy to make aluminum cans out of old aluminum cans. So there's no question that it's worth it to recycle those things. Making plastic into new things is something that is only beginning to be discovered. But there's no doubt that eventually recycling plastics will become the norm.

Automation will one day recycle everything and make everything from recycled materials, similar to the way nature works today. Today our efforts are minimal. However, if we make it past climate change, our culture will change enormously because of AI and robots.

Try 1 dollar depsits on ALL bottles cans and carrier bags

The study took into consideration the Huge landfills that will emit toxic fluids & gases for perhaps centuries, did it? Or just more fake facts.......

Bring back glass bottles for soda pop with the deposit charge, that could help I think