That entire motto is a distraction, so that corporations can whinge about consumers not doing "their part".

And don't forget, corporations are also encouraging people not to reduce purchases, and designing their products such that reusing is either impossible (good luck reusing a torn potato chip bag), infeasible, or even dangerous.

Recycle is just the final, catch-all lie at the end. It only works for very specific types of plastics, and even then usually can only be done an astonishingly few number of times.

As the article notes,

the recycling push has encouraged consumers to accept wasteful packaging, particularly plastics, when forcing the use of more biodegradable material would have been a less damaging course of action.