I think the best answer is that we are using chemistry and biology to find the solution, but “plastics” aren’t just one chemical and there are lots of things that go on with chemistry that make it difficult to target one set of compounds without also targeting similar but useful (often even necessary) similar chemicals. And, of course, that we like plastics so much for that reason that they don’t easily break down (it is a selling point for using them), so finding a way to cause them to destruct naturally is precisely the opposite of why we make them in the first place.
Some plastics are biodegradable, and some plastics can be targeted by biological modifications that create things that will biodegrade when they do not yet exist. It takes time, money, and work to find an answer to the problem of how to make something which will destroy this stuff out in the wild world that won’t also cause even bigger problems and/or destroy it where we don’t want it to happen.
There is no “Poof, look at the simple answer to this really complicated problem”. We wish, but it isn’t no matter how much we want.
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.
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.
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.
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