There was some scandal here in Australia recently where we discovered our plastics were all getting bundled up and shipped to China. I think it came out because China stopped accepting it. I don't think any of it was getting recycled at all.
Update: After doing some reading to jog my memory. China stopped buying it so there was oversupply here in Australia, so the price plummeted, so it was not economical to do anything with it, so I believe it was stockpiled.
Same thing for the US as well: China stopped importing trash, so we just started chucking ours into landfills, which isn't a great way to keep people motivated about recycling.
In order for us to start building things to last, there are a number of things that would need to happen first. We're pretty much at the mercy of the companies who have integrated the manufacturing of plastics into their supply chain. There's no doubt that they've optimized their own individual cost-benefit ratios as much as possible, which involves externalizing costs as much as possible. It's not purely due to greed, which is unfortunately a super common and super facile take; rather, they have to get all their shit as efficient as possible (privately, not socially) in order to remain competitive. Capitalism forces participants in the market to be continually improving in order to remain competitive; unfortunately, offloading costs onto the environment is a great way to do this, which has absolutely disasterous effects at global scale.
Our options are 1) to change the market conditions through state regulation, but that only works at the national level. 2) We can impose tariffs to try to incentivize our overseas trade partners into changing their behavior, but they're also free to shop elsewhere where there are no such "barriers to free trade" (in addition, we'd also be incentivizing overseas governments and companies to compete with each other for who can take the most environmental waste the cheapest, which ultimately does absolutely nothing to solve the problem). 3) Instead of changing the economics from the top down, we could look to bottom up solutions (with perhaps some help from government). If companies who use unrecyclable plastics were required to clearly mark their packaging as such - say, requiring plastic bottles of Sprite to have a conspicuous red ring around the neck (obviously NOT made of unrecyclable plastic), this would impose minimal additional cost, but it would contribute to consumer awareness by introducing the public to a semiotics of environmental consequences - THIS bottle is going to end up in a landfill. It's recyclable, but it won't get recycled, because no one wants your trash. Competitors, seeing a market opportunity, would be incentivized to explore a shift to "green" packaging, distinguishing their brand as well as their individual products from the wasteful stuff. (Superficially, it looks to be the same approach as mandating cigarette packaging to show photos of lungs filled with pulmonic phlegm-cheese in order to get consumers to think twice. However, from my experience, smokers are aware of the joys of emphysema, but it's damage they're doing to themselves, so there's not really that much disgust or shame. Moreover, cigarette warnings suffer from too much abstraction: yeah, cigarettes cause cancer, but the impact of this pack is not quantifiable, and plus, I can easily displace any feeling of responsibility, because I can always quit later. Compare to the real-time insight that this bottle before me is offering ten minutes of bubbly enjoyment but will go on to hang around on our planet as absolutely useless plastic somewhere for a thousand years immediately after the consumption of its contents in one of our designated waste dumps we pretend aren't a problem growing worse alarmingly quickly … it’s much more cognitively salient when the negative consequences being signified are nearly certain, the signifier pointing to it is not an amorphous type of behavior, but an individual observable token, and the nature of the connection between the two is indexical, i.e. a physical, direct cause/effect relation between signifier and signified.
I was going to go on about Dosenpfand in Germany - the deposit you pay on cans is high to incentivize consumers to recycle them to get their deposit back, but due to the inconvenience of having to return them to the store to get it, plastic bottles of beer (kein Scheiß) have become an attractive alternative to some consumers. But I should actually be working for the man right now ….
Milk usually comes in #2.