Recycling metals is good, especially aluminum. Recycling glass? Not bad. Recycling plastic? That is literally something the oil industry forced by having their resin codes look almost exactly like the recycling symbol. People understandingly confused the resin codes to mean it was recyclable and flooded recycling centers with plastic. So instead of throwing it in the garbage and telling people plastic is not recyclable, they did what they could to recycle it. Sorting and cleaning was a pain in the ass and made it not worth it...in the US. China was happy to accept it for a couple decades until a few years ago. Now most recycling centers only accept plastic with a reason code of 1 or 2. But people do not really check the number on the symbol. A lot of it is 5 which is not recyclable in the vast majority of places but people still toss that into recycling because they think it has the recycling symbol on it. So recycling centers have to sort that shit out and send it to the landfill. It is a massive waste of resources that the oil companies are fine with since people think they are doing their part.

Recycling in general though was not supposed to be a fix for climate change. While recycling things like aluminum is significantly more energy efficient than mining, the bigger issue there is the mine itself.

Recycling does not have any impact on climate change and was never suggested to have any impact on climate change

I hate it here.

In general I feel like no one really takes a holistic view of this and everyone just points fingers. If indeed all the models are correct and human-produced CO2 is causing global warming, it's not just "corporations" or "the rich" or just individuals, it's the whole of the machine of humanity hacking away at the tree branch they're sitting on, and we need to radically shift our energy production to eliminate greenhouse gas externalities, and ideally figure out, what's it called, CO2 sequestration or whatever, to bring it back to normal.

And to the degree we can't shift immediately, we shouldn't just be burning fossil fuels towards ends we don't even need, like dumb luxury goods or just driving in circles. It does come down to all of us as individuals - some of us have more power than others (yeah, more or less proportionally to wealth), but the buck has to stop somewhere.