Some commercial waste disposal does sorting of recycling out of the waste, they will even ask for it to not be separated prior so that they don't have to transport it separately.
This is typically why you see this.
Whether that is a better way of doing it I don't know.
Mocking environmentalism is nice until you can't drink the water from your tap because it has too much PFAS and microplastics in it. But go ahead, it's funny, I guess.
plastic recycling is a way of producers to shift blame onto consumers and has been shown to not affect new plastic production basically at all, because recycled plastic just makes for worse plastic.
environmentalism is good, but plastic recycling is not going to make the world better.
There's 2 sides to every coin. Consumers were lied to, yes, but consumers also choose to buy plastic over glass. But that's not my problem with the comic. My problem is that it's the posterchild of "nothing I do matters anyway, so might as well not care and pollute". It also feels very much like a sarcastic excuse to people who tell others to clean up after themselves.
environmentalism is good, but plastic recycling is not going to make the world better.
Yes, but it can better than nothing. Shipping it off to a third-world country (which I think the EU finally banned) and then pointing at the country and saying "look, they don't recycle, it's not our fault" harms us all of course. Anyway, the comic rubs me the wrong way.
Though, to be honest, plastic recycling is mostly a myth in in the first place. For most plastics, the "recycling" procedure consists of paying some impoverished country to let you dump them there.
Basically, every plastic bottle can be assumed to contribute to microplastics contamination sooner or later. Glass and aluminum bottles are better (as are cans); both of those are economically feasible to recycle.
That is all true, but still not an excuse to drop your plastic bottle beside a trash can and when called out about it go "it's all part of my evil plan". These kinds of comics, regardless of their intention, will be used as a reason for people to say "recycling doesn't work, so whatever I do, nothing will change, so I can pollute at will".