I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to handle international shipping being so cheap. If there were mountains of nominally-recyclable stuff building up in Hoboken, I think we’d have some kind of tax or regulatory fix because it’s harder to ignore a problem which is that easy to document. When it’s being sent through four levels of subcontractor on the other side of an ocean, people can just choose not to see problems which don’t obviously affect their kids but whose fixes would raise prices.
There is a reason a lot of this stuff gets handled in the worst way possible, it is the only economics that work so far.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gvq1rd0geo