Guess I’m asking if it’s being recycled here in the USA
Short answer: No
More nuanced answer: Mostly no but there are a few exceptions
All my comments are related to household recycling: Paper, plastic, metal, and glass. Everything else, batteries, catalytic convertors, engine oil, and so on, are legitimately recycled. Household waste is where the story gets interesting.
Recycling is an economics problem. The origins of mainstream recycling even had a marketing department to help sell it.
Once the general public came to learn that plastic has a 10,000 year lifespan, the plastic industry had an image problem. To combat that image problem, they turned to recycling. They all but invented plastic recycling, pretty much made it up out of thin air: "Yeah, plastic takes forever to biodegrade, but you can RECYCLE it into something else!" Notice where the onus is now: "It's not for *us* to stop making plastic, it's up to *you* to recycle it!" As part of a concerted marketing push, they created the recycling logo (the tringle of arrows) and started putting the plastic classification as a number with the logo.
There was a problem though: 99.5% of processors weren't able to recycle plastic. Not that they didn't want to or it wasn't profitable to recycle, they literally didn't have the capability. That would have caused a problem for the plastic industry and their recycling plans, so they never talked to recyclers about it. The recycling logo to identify the type of plastic? Completely arbitrary by the plastic industry. The numbers didn't mean anything to recyclers.
With this marketing push (remember "reduce, reuse, recycle" that was taught in school? Yeah, also plastic industry marketing), municipalities were basically bullied by residents into starting recycling programs, no matter how uneconomical (or even possible) it was to recycle.
More economics.
Per ton, it costs 5x more to recycle a piece of waste than it does to bury it in a landfill. That's very important. If you want to sell your recycled material back to manufacturers to make into new things, it has to be less expensive than getting virgin raw material.
Paper is made from trees. Plastic is made from oil. Both trees and oil are easy to extract from the Earth and are already being collected at a huge scale. That makes both pretty cheap and also makes it very difficult for recycled plastic and recycled paper to compete on a cost basis.
Paper and plastic are mostly thrown into landfills.
Even if you have a special bin to put your recyclables into and a special truck comes to pick up that special bin, once it is sorted, the paper and plastic eventually follow the other garbage to the landfill.
Metal and glass are a different story. Metal is really hard to get out of the ground. Glass requires a lot of effort to create from raw materials. Both can be utilized from a recycled form more cheaply than they can from the raw materials.
Metal and glass are typically always actually recycled.
Unfortunately, with all the cardboard boxes and plastic packaging, the bulk of what is collected is paper and plastic.
It didn't used to be this way. Until 2018, Chinese companies collected sorted recyclable waste by the ton, as much as they could from America and Europe. A Chinese woman named Zhang Yin became a billionaire developing the logistics of using empty container ships returning to Chinese ports to haul recyclable waste.
In 2018, for various reasons, the Chinese government put a stop to the importation of solid waste. They basically said to the companies importing recyclable material, "Stop collecting other countries garbage and start recycling China's trash."
That was the end of the gravy train.
That's where we're at now. For most materials, the economics just don't work in America. Recyclers won't process what they can't sell and if it's cheaper to make plastic and paper from raw materials, there aren't many buyers.
Somebody has to account for that cost. Until it becomes more expensive to use raw materials instead of recycled materials or some type of regulation forces a change in the amount of recycled material required by manufacturers, expect more of the same.
