Aluminum recycling still makes complete sense both economicaly and environmentally. It's cheaper and less energy intensive to reprocess cans and car bodies than to process ore into metallic aluminum. We should be focusing on recycling of metals (including batteries) and try to ditch plastics for glass. Glass just becomes sand in a landfill, which is vastly preferable to plastics that will still be around in a million years.
I generally feel the same way that you do, especially about recycling metals. But glass is much heavier than plastic, which translates to more energy spent shipping products around. We need to be cautious about the effects of plastics, and especially microplastics, on the environment. We also need to recognize that plastics are part of the picture when it comes to reducing carbon emissions.
The weight issue with glass is a good point. At some level we may need a subtle cultural shift away from individually packaged items. The other day i saw individually packaged eyedrops. The packaging was more mass and volume than the product, and probably contained sketchy plasticisizers.
If we can shift to renewables and electric trucks for overland shipping, it would at least help.
But it is also extremely easy to filter out aluminium from the general waste stream, so no real need to separate them, especially as the average consumer is not very consistent.
