Industry doesn't just fix things voluntarily, especially when it costs money - that's what governments and regulations are for.

Unfortunately Australia has consistently voted to prop up house prices rather than to tackle these types of issues - the most recent election being somewhat of an exception.

Plastic recycling was megacorps gaslighting consumers (hate that word) and pushing the blame to us from the very beginning. They don't want to fix the issue.

And even PET only gets recycled a relatively small percentage of the time.

The industry claims that 9% - 18% of plastic put in recycling bins gets recycled but even that's probably an overstatement. Also they're including the plastic which gets shipped to SE Asia for "recycling" - but once it gets there it's actually landfilled because that's cheaper than recycling. So the amount of actual plastic recycling which actually occurs is probably negligible.

if we stop sorting, it’s just another thing people can point to to say that the task is insurmountable… sorting helps to make a good recycling solution easier to implement in the future. i think of it like voting

As someone who has worked with asphalt, we have tried using different mixes with plastic, glass, shredded rubber and printer ink cartridges in it, hard part is organising it with the batch plants, it only tends to happen when they decide to do trials with it, otherwise it's just the normal emulsion, stone and sand mix. The laying and finish seems relatively the same across all the mixes, time will tell with the time it takes to break down and has to be replaced

This solution will worsen micro plastic pollution in the environment. We need to be moving towards a solution where we can control where the final destination of the plastic is.