Recycling has been all over the Western World like a wet diaper on a baby for almost 50 years now. What could POSSIBLY be more liberal that the recycling habit? Well, besides gun control, but I digress.
Recycling is one of those ideas we conservatives never looked into adequately. We're paying for that failure NOW.
You see, all along, recycling was an ARTIFICIAL idea, an idea which ONLY EVER WORKED because of an ENGINEERED MARKET for the recycled plastics which are it's main component. That engineered market was China, which early on, figured out how to avoid having to make their own tosser-plastics. They bought up all of ours. Paid good money for them, too, because of all that expensive oil they WEREN'T buying to make those plastics they NEEDED.
The Chinese engineered market for our recyclables has collapsed, for two reasons: First, China is much more industrialized than it was three decades ago, so they generate their own recyclables to re-use. Second, the bottom dropped out of the oil market, and prices are much lower now, so it's cheaper again to make plastic from scratch than it is to buy and ship it from the USA.
Where does this all leave the USA? With recycling yards closing, or worse, just using their hidden-in-contract safety-valves and sending all that plastic to landfills to be buried.
Wait! You scream in your best liberal protest voice. How can they just dump all those plastics I laboriously recycle (and in many cases, at the point of liberal/commie guns - just look up the penalties for failing to recycle every scrap that are in place in King County, WA.
So, my Guru Of All Things Thinkable, you sniffle & sob, WHAT DO WE DO?
We write off the entire idea, that's what we do. We improve our landfills as much as we can, we invest in incineration facilities, we site more landfills, we go back to old systems like wrapping the meat in PAPER, not PLASTIC. Above all, the next cockamamie idea the Liberals bring us, we actually LOOK at it, not just try to FEEL it like they want us to do.