Recycling in the United States is in serious trouble. How does it work?

You probably have no idea how recycling works.
Most Americans — who recycle nearly 87 million tons of waste each year — likely think that the plastic and paper thrown into those special blue bins gets sorted by some nebulous government agency and automatically becomes an environmentally-friendly product.
But that's not how it works. Recycling, first and foremost, is a business.
When recycled goods get picked up by the state's waste management corporation, they are taken to a Material