When COVID-19 hit, the only local rural recycling option stopped accepting anything except corrugated cardboard.

Of course, who knows what happened to the recycling before that -- but right now, almost all of my recyclables go into the trash.

Don't lose sight of the forest for the trees. The whole environmental problem with plastic in well managed landfills is filling up city landfills where land is expensive. Rural landfills will never run out of space. It's a non-problem as long as it does actually make it to the landfill and not washed down a river or something.

Out in rural areas there's also zero composting. I know, because I own a homes in both a major US city and a rural location.

Also, most of the plastic the city takes, the rural location services won't.

Homes in rural areas have lots of land where you can compost yourself. Plastic recycling can be expanded by increasing the bottle fee and expanding some form of it to all plastic.

Hm, mine and my neighbors don't. There are communities with small lots like ours that simply don't look or sound like giant farms with acres of land to burn your own trash or create your own composting. In fact we look darn near suburban. We have neighborhoods and small towns. It's not all prairie and farm land when one describes rural life.

This is absurd. Yes rural lacks a government run composting program because it would have a negative benefit but plenty of people do there own composting and use it for gardens or such.

In rural areas many people feed their table scraps to chickens.