A Boring Dystopia

In Europe, they do a much better job at recycling, because they drive home the importance of sorting the material you recycle yourself. There are multiple bins for different types of recyclable materials, whereas in the US it all goes into a big blue bin. Glass, tin, aluminum, paper, and every kind of plastic, all in one bin. Conventional recycling, that involves shredding the plastic into pellets, and then reforming them into a usable container, is 55-85% effective.

I feel like all we really need to do is advance recycling at the community level, with different bins. Subsidize mechanical recycling while regulating/limiting use of new plastic in packaging. If your product needs plastic packaging in order to ship, then a regulation should require that packaging be at least a certain percentage recycled. Additionally, they can enact rules around the right to repair your own devices, that could pave the way for legislation aimed at curbing "planned obsolescence" and the production of single-use electric devices like vape pens.