From my European point of view, the problem is not necessarily the almost invisible symbol but the government endorsement of recycling. Being forced to collect rubbish in some centralised way with tons of stupid rules made me think that recycling was working and that plastic was a relatively green choice (for something coming from oil).

This propagated down in the economy with brands using more and more plastic in the last 30 years. Everything is plastic nowadays, even what used to be glass (like milk containers).

Both government and mainstream media were all about people following all the dumb rules (I wonder how many hours of lost productivity we collectively lost as a species) or you hated the planet.

In the last few of years it turned out recycling is mostly useless, even if we had the evidence for it since the beginning. Most of it is unrecyclable, some of it get shipped to China to burn, a minor part of plastic gets recycled (and it can even be recycled a limited amount of times).

The government trying to intervene now is doing too little too late. The only thing I can understand is that big oil bought our governments officials and media. What they bought is 30 years to make money selling oil and enough time to shift their investment to something greener for the next cycle of corruption and profiteering.

Incidentally I know a family in the oil business and the new generation is investing the family empire in renewables, pocketing all the government's incentives for solar energies, while they're at it.