My understanding is that the overwhelming majority of recycled material just ends up with the rest of the trash.
I'm asking because over the years I've hoarded an incredible amount of the plastic flower pots that house plants come in, and I've recently admitted to myself that I'm never going to use them. I'd chuck them all into the recycling, but they're all dirty so I have to wash each one individually, and I'm not sure if there's any actual point in doing that.
Plastic recycling, specifically, is pretty much a joke. Aluminum, glass, and paper recycling can be legit (depends on local recycling infrastructure) but plastic recycling is basically a marketing exercise for plastic manufacturers. A lot of the time, the type of plastic is not easily recyclable (if at all), or not efficient to recycle, and often there are multiple types of plastic in a given item, making recycling infeasible.
In short, find a way to reuse or repurpose plastic, and if you can’t do that, you might as well toss it in the trash, because it’s going to end up in a landfill either way.
This exactly, glass is by far the easiest, but I have been told aluminum is most likely to actually get recycled due to the material itself being the most valuable. But I haven't done too much research.