alt Hacker NewsI do as well but it's more recognizing that large companies and govts created or allowed these problems to occur. So even when we try as individuals to slow the damage, they are capable of undoing all that with one bad decision. Like you say with the lack of records for where the stuff goes.
Also anecdotally when staying with a friend in a different city I had to break the news that the bin they thought was recycling went into the same truck. They had been separating their recyclables for months. You can try but it might not matter cuz they don't care.
I still try but would be lying if I wasn't a bit bitter they successfully shifted blame onto consumers.
I also still try. Before putting plastic packaging in the green bin, I clean and wash it to avoid contaminating the plastic but then my plastic waste gets mixed in with recyclables from my neighbours who aren’t co conscientious. Even if I assume that the plastic really will be recycled in East Asia, there is still a fair chance that I’m just wasting my time and unnecessarily using water by doing so. It’s the lack of transparency that really annoys me.
On the issue of transparency, most people think that the Green Dot symbol¹ means an item can be recycled. It was only about 10 years ago that I learned that this just means that “suppliers and producers have contributed financially to the recycling of packaging in Europe”². In Ireland, Repak is an industry-led NGO that was created as a form of green-washing regulatory capture and I presume other European countries have their own equivalent.
¹ https://repak.ie/images/uploads/icons/The_Green_Dot_Symbol.p...
² https://repak.ie/recycling/recycling-symbols/