ironically the recycling plants catch fire so frequently that they are essentially just incinerating the waste instead of recycling it.
Post-consumer recycling of most non-metallic resources is just pointless.
There is a point, but it’s not obvious. There’s a good article on this on Cato Unbound here. The unseen benefit of recycling is to divert material away from landfills, which are expensive. So expensive, in fact, that if we charged people the true cost of landfill disposal, they would resort to illegal dumping. We don’t want that, so we subsidize garbage disposal at the consumer level, and post-consumer recycling programs are an attempt to mitigate the cost of that subsidy.
It’s putting the charge at the wrong end of the system. Put a landfill deposit on new products based on their rough contents, use the principal to buy the land and the interest to operate the landfills. Pay out money from the fund when recycling firms permanently recover waste from the landfill, based on rough contents.
Efficient land and resource usage, recycling, purchasing of used goods thereby incentivized.