He obviosuly then does not even know that residential collections for recycling is done so much and so successfully in most U.S. states now that that success has become a problem due to the basic laws of supply and demand.
To get recycled, the collected material usually has to be sold (by the local recycling collector) to either a third party dealer/distributor that sells material for recycling to companies that take the material, break it down and create new materials to be used in making products from recycled goods, or directly to such companies.
But the end and the middle of that product chain are balking at taking in more materials as fast as materials are being collected, because the supplies they already have are already more than they can use, sometimes for weeks, months or in some cases years. This was already actually an unacknowldged U.S. condition, when China was buying so much of the stuff. Now China has more than enough materials for recycling from its own consumers, and has been refusing new supplies from the U.S.
So the local contractors who collect materials for recycling are being hit with lower prices they will get for the stuff, and the same is true for the mid level distributors. End users are either offering less money for, or from time to time refusing, some or all the goods others want to sell to them. One could say it is sort of like too much of a good thing.
Consequently, some local contractors that make the residential collections are more frequently finding THEIR best financial choice is to take it to the landfill.
You have to arealize just how uninformed the governor of Washington state is on this issue, even on recycling matters in his own state.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/Washington-counties-could-stop-recycling-some-plastic
The other clowns, to lesson the competition, ought to kick the governor of Washington state out of the clown car. I think he is dead weight.
Good summary of the recycling problem.
But it is even worse than that.
Recycled material is “owned” by the company as soon as it puts out a dumpster to collect the inbound trash. And, bad trash = worse recycling” raw material. Colored glass with clear glass? Can’t melt it without decontaminating it and separating the colored glass. Plastic in there? Got to remove plastic, paper, paint, gunk in the glass.
Steel and aluminum and brass? Worth recycling. But you don’t get good alloys from the junk being melted! You get trash steel of unknown alloys, no control of copper (from melted wires and motors), no control of the plastic s and paint and melted coatings!
Paper? Better burn it as fuel. Cardboard? Burn it - half will be cardboard boxes filled with everything else. The rest? A mix of paper and boxes and plastic and glass and coffee grounds and rotten food and rats and dead mice and possums.