Liz Kasell, who founded the REDcycle soft plastic recycling scheme which collapsed with thousands of tonnes of plastic stockpiled in warehouses across the country, insists she believed materials being collected by the company would be saved from landfill.
Reducing how much is used in the first place should always have been the priority. But businesses hate the idea of any message to use less of something. So they lobby for things like recycling to be pushed instead, because that both focuses the attention on the behaviour of individuals instead of them, and allows them to keep selling more. And people in general seem to be more than happy to believe that recycling magically fixes the waste problem so that they can keep buying their convenient single use products and not have to do arduous things like remember their own shopping bags.