How much plastic ever got recycled in the first place? My understanding is it was always largely a charade where we mixed plastic in with stuff that made sense to recycle like aluminum cans and then sent it all to China where they would recycle the aluminum and burn/bury the plastic and we all just pretended everything got recycled. Eventually the recyclable:garbage ratio got so low that China said enough and refused to take it any more.
Most recycling is bullshit. "Electronics recycling" ships it off to third world countries where people pull apart PCBs over diesel fires and whatnot, dumping stuff all over the ground.
Each country gets tired of their land being used as a toxic waste dump and their people being poisoned, so the recyclers work to find another country desperate for some sort of industry.
The only solution is to tax the electronics at sale to cover the cost of recycling it in the least hazardous way possible, with extra penalties for devices with a fixed lifetime (ie, non-replaceable batteries.)
I'm late to the party, but I guess modulariry would be a plus. For example, CPUs don't grow in big leaps of capacity anymore, it would make sense to rediscover the practice of upgrading CPU, RAM, battery, storage, etc. instead of whole devices. This could put a significant dent in ewaste for bigger devices.
