Industry doesn't just fix things voluntarily, especially when it costs money - that's what governments and regulations are for.

Unfortunately Australia has consistently voted to prop up house prices rather than to tackle these types of issues - the most recent election being somewhat of an exception.

Plastic recycling was megacorps gaslighting consumers (hate that word) and pushing the blame to us from the very beginning. They don't want to fix the issue.

And even PET only gets recycled a relatively small percentage of the time.

The industry claims that 9% - 18% of plastic put in recycling bins gets recycled but even that's probably an overstatement. Also they're including the plastic which gets shipped to SE Asia for "recycling" - but once it gets there it's actually landfilled because that's cheaper than recycling. So the amount of actual plastic recycling which actually occurs is probably negligible.

if we stop sorting, it’s just another thing people can point to to say that the task is insurmountable… sorting helps to make a good recycling solution easier to implement in the future. i think of it like voting