We need to be careful about this narrative as we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Keeping pushing "recycling plastic" is useless and people are going to stop recycling all around. The real message here should be to focus on PET and HDPE and for local recyclers to be more transparent about what plastics they can recycle. Reuse is good and all, but it's not the whole solution. Single use plastics aren't going anywhere.

Since China banned imports of waste, Japan has been working on improving recycling capabilities at home. They collect something like 86% of their plastics properly sorted and are developing new more readily recyclable plastics. We should follow their lead.