Canada's west coast is the same. Despite some reports implying the contrary, properly sorted flexible plastic waste does get diverted away from landfills and oceans and remade into product, in BC. And we also have bottle and can deposits, like most Canadian provinces (called consigne/consignment in Québec).

Apparently bottle deposits are only a thing in 10 of 50 US states.

Metal is way easier to recycle than plastic tbf

Bread tags? What do they do instead? The only choices Ive seen are a stupid plastic tile or a wire, and I can’t imagine single use wire is better than a stupid single use plastic tile

That’s needlessly pessimistic, but I’ll believe general consumer recycling programs are not very effective.

• I know my composting program does something because I can give them food waste and get back compost
• I know can recycling works because there is an entire industry supporting it, plus aluminum is energy intensive and I’ve repeatedly read it is the most recycled material
• I know electronics recycling works because it’s expensive
• I believe industrial recycling works because they have bulk quantities of pure material and there’s generally profit somewhere.

Most of all I believe my city’s consumer recycling is fairly effective because of the number of things they have specific steps/actions/destinations for. More importantly we don’t have a landfill and the one we use is very expensive, so there’s a profit motive for minimizing what we dispose of