Are you sure this is true? Searching now, I seem to find claims that the majority of recycled glass is often made into new containers as one would expect. Here, for example, is a source that says "Up to 90% of glass collected via multi-stream recycling programs becomes new glass products": https://ourhappyplanet.org/glass-recycling/.
Obviously, "up to" is weasel-speak, but I found some other sites making similar although slightly lower claims. Also, there is a distinction between "single stream" and "multi stream" recycling, with this source claiming that the percentage for "single stream" is only 45%. Do you know of better numbers? Or economic arguments for why clean glass would not be recycled?
[1] https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
[2] https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy...
The only solution to this is to enact taxes on the sale of fossil fuels so high that it forces people to consume less, and/or makes reuse economical.
I'd like to see the cost of waste and re-use placed entirely on producers. If you sell something you have to accept it's waste back. I think we would see a big shift to reusable durable containers.
I'd propose that we tax the hell out of manufacturers' that won't accept delivery of things they manufactured (be it packaging or the products themselves--in whatever state). To avoid this tax they must also meet transparency guidelines for how inbound waste of this sort is disposed of.
This way the "how do we deal with the waste?" problem is handled by the same people who decide what materials to use in the first place.
We use the tax money to set up municipal recycling facilities that use the bar codes on the waste to sort it based on who made it, and instead of shipping it to third world countries they ship it there instead.
Yes, this is correct, although, it is also important to note that the reason why plastic is so "cheap" is because the externalities of it are not captured in the price. To put this in a different perspective, it is best to think of plastic as having a price that is below its costs. Plastic today has a low price. At the same time, the world is becoming filled with it. This accumulation is developing severe and systemic long term consequences. Reverting the damage is extremely difficult, expensive, and some damage may be irreversible, such as the loss of life and ecosystems. The externalities produced by plastics can be seen as a form of long term debt. In this way, it makes it clear that plastic is not all that cheap. In fact, it's quite expensive.
So how can we alter this behavior? I'll venture on my own here by suggesting a similar proposal by Professor Nordhaus and his book The Climate Casino, which is to capture the cost of the externalities into the price through the use of taxation. Carbon taxes is the most supported form of reducing carbon emissions by economists. I wouldn't be surprised if the same support exists for reducing our plastic production. If the production of plastic is taxed at the bottom of the supply chain, thus making it more costly compared to alternative materials, then we should expect an automatic market restructure that will naturally phase it out.
Maybe we do trial runs of these taxes or something? Has that been done before? A/B testing on public tax money?
If you account for all the externalities recycling (except for metal) is terrible for the environment.
People only do it because it "feels good".
If you actually cared about the environment, metal should be recycled, and everything else burned for energy.