RE: We Created Plastic. We can't do without it. Now, We're Dying in it: A Study of how Degrading Plastic Emits Greenhouse Gases
What I must adamantly disagree with you on is that recycling technologies are complex. You can sort plastics by hand with the recycling label, or by weight and density after shredding. Shredding plastics can be done with common equipment, like a wood chipper. You can just put the pieces in water to sort them by density. They can then be melted down and reformed easily.
Technically, the biggest issues that come sup at scale, like at a MRF, is contamination and commingling. There are also market volatility issues, largely driven by acceptable reuse - it's difficult to make a a foodsafe container when there's no way to tell if the milk jug on the line was discarded after use or was reused when someone changed their oil.
We can also very easily turn them back into oil, with something as simple as a gasifier, which is basically just a wood burning stove with a cooler on the exhaust, that then collects the oil that falls out from the fumes
Easy in the backyard, very complex at a industrial scales that require profitability, stability, and air pollution control. Analogous to 'you can make energy by burning refuse to power a steam driven generator."
You're right that you absolutely can run into problems when dealing with industrial level. One of the major ones when dealing with trash is contamination. But these are not insurmountable problems. The primary difficulty is education.
We also need to get more recycling plants built more places, even if we start using less plastic, because we still have so much out there.
If you build a gasifier correctly, you shouldn't have any problems with pollution, as it should be collected. Of course, if you don't build it correctly you can get carbon monoxide poisoning.
Well, yes, of course. But such a small statement contains a huge amount of capital expenditure and engineering expertise.