https://www-theguardian-com.translate.goog/us-news/2022/oct/23/us-plastic-waste-recycled-2021-greenpeace
Apparently the same thing happens in most countries. It would be important to have more information. The promises of greenwashing are falling one by one.
"USA citizens discarded 51m tons of plastic in 2021 – of which almost 95% ended up in landfills, oceans or scattered in the atmosphere.
The report, Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, updates the 2020 survey of 370 recycling plants which found most plastics were not widely accepted, and even the bottles and jugs were not completely recycled or recyclable. Not much has changed, in fact the official recycling rate in the US has fallen from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. At that time, the US, like many countries, exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped.
After China stopped accepting plastic waste in 2018 because it was basically garbage, too dirty to recycle, the shortfall in capacity was never recouped while plastic use kept rising.
But exporting plastic was always a false solution, as is all plastic recycling because plastic waste is so ubiquitous that it’s extremely difficult to collect, virtually impossible to sort, environmentally harmful and expensive to reprocess, and often contains toxic materials."