At some point in the past 20-30 years I started recycling. My town had just installed these new separate trash bins, I was just tryna "do my part" and be able to say I didn't contribute to the shit environment we will have in the future. Nowadays, I neither recycle, nor feel guilty about it. The illusion that I was doing anything productive with my time fell apart the time I saw the garbage guys pick up all the trash containers and dump them in the same truck. I asked them "hey, does the trash site have some way to sort the garbage?" thinking that maybe I was missing something. They said "nah" and moved on.

Nowadays I still watch the same trucks pick up the same trash cans in the exact same fucking way. In the meantime I've learned the company belongs to someone close to the mayor, so there's not even a chance this kinda shit will be reprimanded, ever.

Not to diminish from your well written post, but there's also an external reason for this, and of course, it has to do with capitalism and profits.

Basically, there was a time when China was taking trash material that's recyclable and doing the recycling. That's when all the recycling craze happened here.

But then, China changed that, and they were no longer accepting recycling material.

But now here in the US we have the full infrastructure for accepting recyclable material, but nowhere to send the material to, to get recycled at a large and cheap quantity.

So no political personal will want to tell you they're not doing it anymore because of costs, because China won't do it cheaply anymore, so you get scenarios like what you described.

There's a YouTube video that describes this.