Reduce, Reuse -- and only as a last resort, Recycle.

Soft plastic recycling is inefficient. It's there to make you feel like you don't need to Reduce and Reuse.

Also, plastic "recycling" is a scam. It's not like metal or glass recycling where the material is just melted and easily turned back into brand new products. Recycled plastic is extremely low quality, there's practically no market for it as a material, uses more energy than producing the plastic in the first place, and generates more in toxic waste than actual usable material.

Also also, you know these icons? The plastic industry deliberately chose a symbol that looks like the recycle symbol to trick the public into thinking almost all plastic is recyclable. They just indicate the type of plastic, and there is no practical way to recycle the majority of the types.

it’s already been mentioned in a comment but recycling isn’t nearly as helpful as it was intended to be and often acts like a bandage on a festering wound. we just move non-recyclable plastic from one area to another. there’s no real regulation over the labels used to indicate how to recycle something, so your guidelines are often wrong. idk it just seems like we pushed for Americans to recycle and then did absolutely no follow-up on how that was going and whether it was working or not.

they did an episode of adam ruins everything on it. tldr: corporations lobbied the american government to remove recycling requirements that moved the onus from them to the american public and the american public took it, like it always does.