The wonders of plastics is what makes them such a pain in the butt to try to undo: they’re quite stable and freakishly large molecules, so it takes quite a bit of energy to undo them into something you can easily work with. It can be done, sure, but the costs, both in terms of money and actual resources, scale terribly.
There are some plastics that are biodegradable.
Most of them are only really compostable under certain circumstances though.
We can do a lot of stuff with other plastics too, but it is always about cost and revenue. A high percentage of clean plastic material can be recycled, but it has to be quite clean indeed. And washing/sorting ist costly again, unfortunately.
Recycling depends on the ease of breaking things down so that you can rebuild it back up. Eg., like a lego set, you can break a completed model down to its pieces, and then reuse it to make another lego set.
For aluminum, you shred it to pieces, remove unwanted pieces and melt it back to new aluminum blocks.
For paper, you shred it back into pulp, bleach it, and remake back into post-consumer paper.
Compared to other recyclables, plastic is much more complex. It has lots of different chemicals that make it up, so its much harder to break apart cleanly.
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