To boost recycling, require package manufacturers to share costs with taxpayers

No one wants tons of waste polluting the environment. Yet over the past few years, some voices in the environmental movement have suggested that recycling, notably plastic recycling, is futile at best — or at worst a ruse that contributes to the ubiquity of plastic trash.

With U.S. recycling rates for plastics ranging from just 8.5% to 13.1%, depending on how and what you measure, consumers are being misled, the argument goes, and producers overstate recyclability claims as license to produce cheap packaging that should be…