I mean, recycling something cheap like plastic is generally a waste of time, it’s hard to argue anything else. But, whole industries exist around scrapping metals, and extracting gold from old electronics is lucrative. Lithium is more valuable than most metals that have healthy scrapping industries, so I disagree that it’s never going to work.
Plastic recycling is generally rated by Lifecycle Cost Analysis as a good thing. It's cheaper and better for the environment and saves carbon, compared with incineration (which is okay if it displaces fossil fuels and filters pollutants) which in turn is better than landfill.
The main input for plastics is currently fossil fuels so there's a lot of misinformation about it, as there is for anything else that would harm fossil fuel sales.
Ironically, they seem to have just given more momentum to the push to ban single use plastics and reduce its use generally.
Propagandists that used to say recycling plastic didn't work are now promoting it to fend off outright bans. The only thing that remains consistent in their approach is "what benefits fossil fuel interests?".
